We have begun teaching Gus to sit, and he has been responding beautifully, especially for a 10-week-old puppy. We both have our training shoes on for Gus. In the past, Maria has left the training mostly to me, claiming (as she often does) that this was something she didn’t know how to do and wouldn’t be good at.

I can tell this is something she does know how to do and is great it. We are both working in sync on Gus and it is paying off, Maria is a different person than she was a few years ago and she trains with common sense, patience and good instincts.

Gus likes food, but he loves attention the most, and attention is our best training tool with him. This morning, he sat on command, and we are working on lengthening the distance so he will sit down 20 feet away as well as five feet. We work in short bursts, five minutes at a time, two or three times a day.

He makes good eye contact, the key to training. When he is tired or distracted, he loses that contact and we stop training.

Puppies Gus’s age do not have long attention spans or great memory attention, but he is getting it rapidly, With sit, will come “stay,” a tough command for breeds this active and responsive.

When his but hits the ground – timing is essential in dog training, we say “good sit,” and if we do this hundreds and hundreds of times right on cue, Gus will know how to sit. This morning, he really seemed to get it.