Last Entry

That was a really fun day yesterday, everyone. Loved spending that much time with all of you. Please keep in touch, send lots of pictures and not question is a stupid one. I'm here for all of you.

This is a link to one of the videos I took yesterday when we had the puppies playing in the pool. It's pretty funny stuff: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SJDLohfgVsI&feature=youtu.be

Countdown Week

Just when I think the puppies are looking big, I find one of them hanging with Bailey, the Maine Coon!

We're into the final countdown now! Puppies are sporting their new tattoos, they've been to Kay's for their testing and I'm looking forward to vegging around the house in the mornings instead of cleaning the potty box and having my ankles bitten!

As a group they were insane tonight. Darryl ended up playing with the three boys tonight in the office. Not sure exactly what was happening, but Blue was racing laps around the room and all of them were wrestling on an air mattress. In the meantime, the girls were busy playing with the little jingly cat balls in the purple saucer. I've uploaded some video of a couple of them doing the balls in the saucer last week. It's Yellow, Green and I think Black. Green was having the time of her life tonight playing in the saucer.

The link to the video is here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=MnYc7rKc8zw

Big dog bones!

The babies have their first "big dog bones" tonight. Small beef soup bones. There's a lot of happy whimpering going on in the puppy pen. I was able to pet all of them while they were chewing, and even remove bones....no growling, no freezing, no snapping, no trying to run away. Exactly what I like to see. We'll do this a few more times before they leave for their new homes. Below are some pictures of them with their bones.

Lots of visitors!

Busy weekend for the puppies. Early Saturday afternoon I took the puppies down to the "forest' for an outing. They ran through the underbrush, climbed over logs and checked out the fenceline. Then we had a long, disorganized "walk" back up the pasture to the house. Later that afternoon Jodie & Will Dobie from Grande Prairie dropped in for a visit. They own Boomer, Morley's brother from this spring's Josh/Chime litter. They brought their little 2.5 year old nephew, Aiden, who had to spend a lot of time on the couch to save his toes!

Today Cassie & Sheldon Young from Prince George were down again, and they played with the puppies for a long time, getting them very, very tired! During that visit my co-worker Janine came for a short visit with her two kids. In the early afternoon, my friend Amis came by with his four boys, and we took the puppies outside to play with the kids.

There are a bunch of new pictures from this weekend, starting here: http://pets.webshots.com/photo/2757438380037483664ENjcza

More Adventures

Monday night I took the puppies outside in my arms to see and hear the big, diesel tractor running. I invited them to sniff the tires and the bucket. They were a little apprehensive, but nobody tried to jump out of my arms. Yesterday I took them outside when I got home from work, as we had a nice warm afternoon. For those that don't know/realize, I'm now using up the balance of my vacation to work shorter days, so I have more time at home with the puppies. I'm going in at 10, and home at 3:30, which gives me some daylight and extra time.

Outside, was fun, they were a little quiet to start with, then they became more brave and we did a fair amount of walking around. I'm hoping that Saturday afternoon will be warm enough to take them down to the wooded area on the north side of the pasture. Lots of logs to jump over and stuff to run through.

They all play a mean game of tug (great for those of you looking at doing dog sports!) and they're doing quite well with the whole potty box thing. They'll all take treats from my hand, which lets me reward them for using the potty box. They're very wild and fun!

New pics at the Webshots page: http://pets.webshots.com/photo/2439167850037483664NqhKCi

Visitors

As you can see the puppies had visitors again this weekend. Saturday afternoon saw a group of six kids in to cuddle the crew. My friend Don Zwicker from Grande Prairie was also here overnight, with Nemo, Parker's brother from the first Dalry litter. Don took loads of photos, so hopefully I'll have some to post soon. This afternoon Cassie & Sheldon Young spent a few hours, along with my friend Linda and her daughter Megan. Cassie was here last Friday and really noticed the differences this week. The puppies are very, very busy now, and they can run, rather than stagger around like a bunch of drunks. They are all starting to play a mean game of tug, and they're packing toys around in their mouths. They've spent lots of time playing with Morley who is very gentle with them. Nina is spending very little time with them now, she comes in to feed them 3-4 times a day and never for more than 5 minutes. She's spending her time with the rest of the dogs now, and I'm feeding her regular rations and will just let her dry up now. I'll post some more pictures to Webshots later tonight.

New Skills

This morning I started feeding small treats from my hands to the puppies, in preparation for our next trip out of doors. With seven of them, it'll be a lot like herding cats if I don't have some tools to convince them that I'm worth following. So, I give them bits of food every time they come to find me, call them as a group (they're actually getting pretty good at that) and reward them for finding me. If I keep doing this while they're rampaging in the puppy room, they should be much easier to manage outside.

Orange and Yellow are the greediest and caught on the quickest, followed by Black and Purple. The other three were off doing their thing a lot of the time, so I didn't get as many repetitions in with them as I needed.

I'll likely pair all of this with a clicker shortly, but the mechanics of it all were sort of eluding me at 6:30 this morning!