We adopted our goldendoodle, Sami in May 2025. My wife and I have had at least one dog in the household pretty much since we got our first house with a fence - we are a dog family through and through. We lost our oldest dog in late 2024 and knew we wanted to make sure that our 3 year old pup, Rocky, would have a playmate. We hadn't gone down the adoption path before but when we saw Sami pop up and got to meet him virtually, we were all-in. He had an interesting background in that he was an outdoor dog in Texas for the first year of his life and was surrendered to a shelter for the first time. He then settled in with a new young family in Colorado but after the family had a newborn and Sami was still working through his puppy energy he was surrendered for the second time to a shelter. To say the least, by the time we brought him into our family, he had a bit of a rough journey of getting the rug pulled out from under him.
He is the kindest and sweetest dog we've ever seen and acclimated extremely quickly to our family. We have two 11 year old kids plus my wife, myself and our other 3 year old pup Rocky making up our family. It took him a little bit to figure out his role with Rocky but from the get-go, he was great with the people he was around on a daily basis. Where we began to struggle was with bringing new people into the house (new to Sami). He would bark, jump, and do everything you would expect could scare away those people when in reality he's just a big baby. We tried a few things on our own but were running out of patience and confidence.
A Sound Beginning was recommended to us by Sami's new vet here locally. We figured this was a chance to get some help but we wanted to make sure the trainer was a good fit for all of us. We had used some training before with our other dogs but we would run into issues where we felt like, as the pet's owners, we were getting talked down to or even lightly scolded. We are generally trying our best so it would be hard to feel like the trainer was listening to how we fit into the equation (parents and kids) as well as the dog. We're all one big family and wanted to be coming at this from a position of positivity and opportunity for growth.
Talking to Kathryn from A Sound Beginning on the phone for the first time, I knew this was going to be a better experience. She listened and let us unload as much as we could about the situation and she was able to quickly come up with a plan for us to try. Her interactions with Sami and her direction of how our family could/should handle the various issues that Sami was presenting were amazingly helpful. She figured out very easy ways to give both the humans and the dogs in the house the confidence that we could adjust and put ourselves in positions to be successful. We've taken all of her advice and training and implemented it as best we can. With that being said, Sami still has room to grow as he's had a couple years of poor experiences we need to get him.