13 Weeks Old (Oct 19-25, 2025)
This week, Ember had her first time home alone for a couple of hours and appears to have done very well.
She is usually waking up only once a night and is very good about getting her business done, then tucking back into her open crate to go right back to sleep.
She likes toys, mostly gravitating towards soft toys, and will take them over to her spot on the giant wolf stuffy toy and give them a little chew. Her other favorites are tug, flirt pole, chase or “gator” hands and of course her brother. Learned this week that blonde braids can also look like tug toys :( Balls aren’t very popular once they stop moving. She is very good about being gentle when playing with our hands.
She also loves toilet paper and cardboard tubes. At the moment she chews on them but they will start to try to eat it so we take it away then. You have to be careful she doesn’t snatch your toilet paper when using the bathroom.
Since she likes chewing we were looking for some bones for her but under four months, there aren’t any commercial chews that are considered safe, as their teeth could break on them. It was recommended to try the Kong toys with wet food in them, and then once they could do that easily, then switch to freezing them. Neither were interested in the wet food filled kong. Sheltie food drive not strong enough I guess. Maybe because they don’t chew hard enough to move the food out of the kong it isn’t appealing to them and they get bored. The gal at the pet store recommended a Toppl (hers is blue), which is more like a cup with pieces in the center so they have to lick or eat around them, and it was a hit. I’ll pick up another, as Phoenix also liked it too.
In my sewing room she kept finding thread despite the room being vacuumed and looked over. Finally figured it out when I caught her opening the short-lidded garbage can to take out the discarded threads. Smart Monkey!
She can now confidently going up the stairs. We are working on down. She now sometimes strands herself at the top of the stairs and upset she’s out of the action
With Pickles now visiting for 5 weeks we are figuring out the leash situation with 3 dogs when it is just one of us. Currently we use the Y connector and connect Phoexnix and Ember together. Wasn’t sure if that was going to work and that he might end up trying to pull her along but she was head of him most of the walks. Phoenix isn’t a big sniffer on walks though so when she does want to stop he is still wanting to keep going so were working on that. She’s enjoying being able to walk for the full walk instead of being carried for part of it.
