Hey there!

His name was Tizer — and he nearly destroyed our marriage.

Not literally. But in 1987, when Stephen and I brought home our first golden retriever, we had absolutely no idea what we were doing.

We tried confining him to the downstairs family room with a baby gate. He jumped it and chewed the vertical blinds.

Every day we tried to move things out of his way. Every day he found something new.

Then one day I came home to find my tube watercolors chewed up, paint smeared all over a towel and Tizer. He'd somehow opened the credenza doors.

He pooped cadmium red light, cadmium yellow, and ultramarine blue for two days.

That was the last straw.

Stephen found Queen City Dog Training Club in the yellow pages. The registrar gave us immediate advice: get a crate. Dogs naturally avoid soiling where they sleep.

My first lesson about dog training? Manage what you can't yet train.

That one principle changed everything. Instead of coming home to chaos, we came home to a clean house and a puppy we could actually enjoy.

It's the same principle I use in every problem-solving session I facilitate. Before you can teach something new, you have to set up the environment for success. Remove the obstacles. Create the conditions. Then teach.

I've been working on a book about this for about ten years. It's almost done. I'll be sharing more about it in the weeks ahead — along with a few stories that might change how you think about learning, failure, and the surprisingly universal principles that connect dog training to engineering to parenting.

More next week!

Cheers,

Marsha & Mooney

P.S. Don't forget to check out the May Reads Plant Learning Seeds books and activities here!​

P.P.S. Twenty monarch caterpillars pretty much demolished all the swamp milkweed and aquatic milkweed this past week. No hard feelings — that's exactly what I bought it for all those weeks ago. And they did leave a bit of stubble.
Then on Monday, May 4th, Elizabeth I, a newly emerged female monarch from our first wave of caterpillars visited me in the garden. I think she was a bit disappointed by the lack of flourishing milkweed, but she sunned herself for nearly 90 minutes before taking off on her first long flight. It's nice when the kids stop by to say hello.

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