Socialization with visitors

Since moving to the east coast and buying our own home, we’ve had both the pleasure and the pain of hosting A LOT of guests. This summer was so busy that I felt like we were running a bed and breakfast. Once I even had to ask my sister to strip the linens off the bed and stick them in the washing machine as she left, because another guest was arriving that evening and I had no time to do the wash myself.

From the beginning of June through the end of August, we had:

7 friends
3 from my side of the family
+ 3 from Yun’s side of the family
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Total: 13 unique out-of-town visitors

To be accurate, 2 out of the 13 did not actually stay overnight, but the remaining 11 did. And a few of them visited multiple times.

The benefit in this overkill of visitors is that Loki and Jujube are now both very well-accustomed to visitors in our home. Loki still is our guard dog in the sense that lets me know when people are arriving, but he’s quite friendly and loves our visitors. Sometimes, he gets so overly excited that he pees in the house. This is annoying to clean up, but for some reason, I also find it funny and endearing.

With so much socialization with human visitors, we have no problems now with service people or contractors who come to do work on the house. Still, sometimes we put the dogs away because not everyone loves dogs and they can get in the way.

I think in order to properly socialize your dogs to humans, you have to also be social. Back when we lived in California, we didn’t have nearly as many visitors, so it was much more difficult to get Loki accustomed to them. But now that we are more social, it seems that visitors are no longer a problem!

Actually, the biggest problem we have with visitors is Jujube’s sneaky ability to slip around all us and bolt out the front door. Luckily she’s never gotten too far, and usually wants to come back anyways to greet the visitor. But my gosh, she sure does love to bolt out that door.