I've continued to work with Gizmo & Simba on the "gimme five". Gizmo has it down pat, so to speak. The only problem I ran into was that I hold my hand up vertically for him to touch it, and that is also my signal for "stay", so Gizmo tries to touch my hand when I tell him to stay! I've begun to stand above him with my arm down, so we get more of a high five effect.

Simba is beginning to get the "gimme five". Often, when he sits for his meal, I find he's holding one paw up. This was a signal that Gizmo was getting it, originally.

Today I decided I would try to train them to jump through a hoop together. They do it sometimes by accident. I figured we would work with two chairs instead of three.

I tapped the chair to get both of them up. No problem — but here is where the fun begins. I wanted to work on stay at the same time, as it will eventually be crucial to getting them to jump through at the right time. Someone was invariably knocking treats off the chair, so there was a lot of up and down, and then someone would jump over to the other chair . . . you get the picture.

I never got them to jump through together, but I did get them to jump through one after another, onto the same chair. So they're getting a feel for being together on the chair.

The chair is, unfortunately, one of the other problems. It's just not big enough for them to turn around on comfortably when they're both on it. And they knocked the chair over at the end, which spooked them.

Despite the comedy of it all (we were in stitches), I think it was a good beginning.

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