The Start of our Button Journey

Mumen and me at High Cliff State Park

September 14th, 2022: Our FluentPet “Get Started” Kit arrived.

It took me all of several minutes to set up the hextiles and program the six buttons that came with the kit. I had been watching a few button-communicating pets on social media, and knowing Mumen’s intellect, I was eager to dive in.

We began with some words he was pretty familiar with already, and others that would help him learn a time element associated with those activities: “Play”, “Pets”, “Outside”, “Mumen”, “Later”, and “All done”.

By the third day, September 17th, Mumen pressed his first button. I actually managed to capture it on video and upload it to Mumen’s TikTok. If you’re interested in seeing the video, you can find it here. The look on his face still makes me laugh. He was so shocked when that button made noise!

I missed a lot of documenting during our initial start, because I remained a hopeful skeptic on whether this was something that would work for us or not … but I shortly became blown away by what Mumen seemed to pick up and understand.

Even my husband, who I can quote as saying, “I thought this was all a bunch of B.S.” later confessed he was shocked by Mumen’s perceived level of understanding.

In the month since starting, I’ve been added to the FluentPet research community and moving forward, I will be tracking Mumen’s progress with button communication. I’m very excited to see where this goes!

To follow Mumen on TikTok, where you can see not only his FluentPet videos, but other silly/fun videos we make along the way, click here!