Swimming with Brax

Another fun thing with the pool this summer was having Brax swim with us.  As you may know, Brax is obsessed with tennis balls, and would do anything to get them.  So all we had to do to get him jumping in the pool was throw his ball in.  It was funny, because at first he didn’t want to get into the water unless he had to, so if the ball was in the jacuzzi he would circle the jacuzzi and stand on the edge with his front paws in the water and kind of scoop his paws toward himself to try to get the ball to float in his direction.  But if that didn’t work he’d give up and jump in for the ball.  We couldn’t get Brax to go up on the waterfall at first, but we soon learned that if one of us stood up there with the ball, Brax would come up and jump off the waterfall to chase the ball when it was thrown.  We even worked for a few days on training Brax to dive for a ball (we cut a hole in it and filled it with small rocks so it would sink), and after some practice he got to the point where he would dive under the water enough to get the ball from 3 steps down under the water, but he never did go all the way to the bottom of the pool before we gave up on teaching him to dive.  But we had to be careful to watch and put the ball away before too long, because Brax is so obsessed with fetching tennis balls that he would keep going long after his poor toe nails would get worn down by jumping from the rough cement at the edge of the pool and his nails would start bleeding, if we’d let him go that far.  Anyway, we had a lot of fun with Brax swimming in the pool.  Jennie and Dalin came over to swim a few times too, and brought their puppy, Achilles.  We since learned from the person who maintains my parents’ pool that it’s not very good for the pool to have dogs swim in it (their body oils are different than humans, which can effect the chemical balance in the pool, plus dogs can track in a little dirt – anyway, it just means more maintenance for the pool, which is more expensive), so we don’t take Brax swimming in the pool anymore.  But it was fun while it lasted.  And I suppose we always have the dog beaches too.