You Can't Teach an Old Dog New Tricks

So, according to dog training books I've read, a great way to discourage a dog from stealing food off the table is to rig a trap with tin cans where the tin cans fall and startle the dog when he takes food from the table. Normally, Howie's pretty scared of loud noises so we thought this would have to work really well.

Well...as you can see, not so much.

Any suggestions on how to teach him to stay off the table?

Bad Dog

Howie likes taking food off the table when we're not looking. We've known that for a while and so we've been trying to teach him not to and we try and remember to keep food away from the edge of the table, out of reach. But yesterday, Jess decided to set up a surveillance camera and watch what Howie would do if he left some food in the middle of the table and then left Howie all alone...

Apparently all he's learned is to wait until we're gone to eat off the table.

Our newest baby (??)

Well, we've done it, we decided to adopt a dog. After years and years of persistent begging, Shae finally has gotten her wish. Our new dog is a schnoodle (I'd never heard of the breed before, it's a schnauzer/poodle cross) and he's 4 1/2 and his name is Howie. His current owner's fiance is allergic to Howie and so even though she loves him (the dog) to pieces, she love her fiance more and is giving Howie away. Her wedding isn't until May so we're just going have Howie over for a few sleepovers here and there until the end of April when he'll come live with us for good. Here are some pictures of our cute little dog:

And, here is some spring cleaning from my camera - when I was uploading the pictures of the dog, I found these pictures that are a little old but still worth posting:

And finally, this is a video of Maira singing "Santa Claus is Coming to Town". She sang it constantly all through the Christmas season and she does a pretty cute rendition of it so I thought I'd videotape it so I could put it on my blog...but then I forgot and it never made it up here at Christmas time so here it is, better late than never!