Doodle Doings

If you have never raised a dog from puppyhood, it is sometimes hard to picture the specifics of bringing a puppy into your home.  Everyone has their own reasons for wanting a puppy, of course.  Some picture a warm fuzzy body to cuddle, others a walking or running companion, still others a friend for their kids to grow up with.  And a dog CAN be all those things and more!  But there will also be times, lots of times, where you say to yourself, ‘Oh my gosh, what have I gotten myself in to?”The above picture says it all, I think.  The dog is ‘Buddy’, the owners the most competent people you will ever meet.  They went on to train Buddy as a Search and Rescue Dog, and founded the International Doodle Owner’s Group (IDOG: http://www.idog.biz), among other things.  But Buddy was their first dog, and their body language in this candid picture right after he came home clearly says, ‘NOW what?’

Now what, indeed.

Bringing home a puppy for the first time is a little like bringing home a newborn.  You are not quite sure what to do, but you know it is a lot!  You are nervous about getting it all right, but are also completely unsure as to how to interpret any communications from the little critter.  Anything you learned from the reading you may have done to prepare yourself for the event has gone right out of your head.  At the same time, you are captivated by the soft eyes, the clumsy but adorable movements, the sweet breath, the immediate trust this tiny creature places in you.

In the coming days your life will become both more complicated, and richer, and dirtier, and more full of laughter. You will have to plan your schedule around the capacity of a very tiny bladder, and wish you had invested in more paper towels and cleaning supplies. You will be frustrated, and if you are lucky, you will be able to laugh at your frustration.  Your puppy will cause you to look at the world, and at yourself, differently, and will get you to meet new people whether you want to or not (everyone loves a puppy!)

So the best advice I can give those of you who are getting a puppy is, hang on for the ride.  And yes, it is worth it.

Puppies are going home!  This is always a bittersweet time.  I am pretty good at not getting TOO attached to puppies in the first couple months they are here.  I tell myself from the beginning that they are not my puppies; I am raising them for someone else.  I love them and care for them and get to know all their little quirks, knowing I will be letting them go soon.  And I am pretty good at that for about 2 months.  If they stay much longer than that I start to get attached despite my best efforts.  I am just getting to the crucial junction with these two litters! Who can NOT get attached to faces like this?

Daisy Double Doodle pups

So puppies are going home, and it is a good thing.  Families are excited, and that is part of what makes this all worth while.

A Doodle puppy of our own, a dream come true

This weekend I was planning puppy deliveries around our holiday travel plans.  One puppy was going to the same town where my sister lives, so the plan was celebrate Thanksgiving with my sister’s family the weekend after Thanksgiving, bringing the puppy with us.  In addition, a puppy was to be delivered to a town half way between Columbus and my sister’s house, so we were going to bring those folks their puppy as we passed through.

But before we could even head out for the holiday, I needed to take care of a minor detail. Sunny, my mini F3 Labradoodle, came into season last week, and according to my calculations she would ovulate on Thanksgiving.  Without fail, I have some kind of doggie event EVERY holiday, so this was not unexpected.  So Sunny is at our house to be bred, and her suitor, Zabba,  a mini F1B Goldendoodle, is also here, visiting from his guardian in Cincinnati.

Zabba: F1B mini Red Goldendoodle

Sunny: F3 Mini Labradoodle

Our house has been like a scene from a teen love flick, with young lovers pining for each other from afar….in this case from across a gate in the back hall.  Well, one young lover, anyway.  Zabba is WHINING and WHINING in frustration at not being able to reach Sunny.  Sunny is not so sure about this whole thing

(this is the first time I am breeding her).  In fact, over the three days they have both been here, she has not become interested in Zabba at all.  Normally when a female is close to ovulating her hormones take over and she will be interested in ANY male.  But Sunny is not receptive at all.  She is nervous, not really eating, very clingy to me, and growls and snaps vigorously, shrieking in indignation, at Zabba if he comes anywhere close to her.  I became concerned that maybe we had missed her fertile window, and took her in for a blood test.  It showed that she DID ovulate on Thanksgiving! So the prime days for breeding are Saturday and Monday. My plan is to allow them to breed on Saturday morning before we leave.  Then Zabba will come with us to my sister’s house, and Sunny’s family will pick her up and she will spend the weekend with her guardians, returning for another breeding on Monday.

I spend Friday getting the two puppies that are being delivered on Saturday ready: baths, groomed, trimmed, contracts and puppy kits ready, final meeting plans made with the new owners, it is all very hectic, but seems to be going well.  Then at 9 PM my younger son begins vomiting.  An hour later, my older son follows suit.  I spent the night on the floor in a sleeping bag in the room between the two rooms where they are camped out, alternating  between napping for a few minutes at a time and dumping their buckets.

By Saturday morning the worst of it seems to be over and my kids are sleeping.  Although we are clearly NOT going to be traveling to my sister’s house, I still need to make plans to deliver the puppies, AND to breed Zabba and Sunny.  That is not going well at all.  Sunny is still FREAKING out if Zabba even walks into the room.  Her guardians are scheduled to pick her up at 9AM, so at 8:15 AM I decide to move to Plan B; I will collect semen from Zabba and artificially inseminate Sunny.  I collect from Zabba, who is more than willing to donate, and I have just begun the insemination when the doorbell rings.  It is Sunny’s guardians, eager to have her home, and early.  In a comical scene I tell my partner to send them home…I’m BUSY! While Sunny is certainly more receptive to me than she was to  Zabba, I am pretty tired by the time we are done.  She may only be 20 lbs, but holding a 20 lb dog upside down (the head has to be lower than the hindquarters for an insemination!) for 10 minutes makes for a LONG 10 minutes.  Especially when I have been up all night with vomiting kids. Sunny is pretty tired too. She is so hormonal she hasn’t been eating well, she hasn’t been sleeping well, and her entire schedule seems topsy-survey.  As I leave the kitchen she seems to be settling in to a nap next to the stove.

Just as I am wrapping up the emails to the folks I will be meeting in a few hours, I hear Sunny whine a couple times in the kitchen.  Poor dog is just tired, I think. A few minutes later, I hear a shout in the kitchen, and a crash.  I burst into the kitchen in time to see my younger son starting to shake poop off his bare foot.  “DON’T SHAKE YOUR FOOT!  SIT ON YOUR BUTT.”  It turns out he had opened the other door to the kitchen and his first step through the door landed his foot in a pile of poop.  He slid, almost falling to the floor.  I guess his excellent balance from his martial arts training kept him upright in the end, upright enough that his instinct was to try to shake the poop off his foot. Poor Sunny had been so distracted this morning that she apparently had forgotten to take care of business while she was out.  She tried to tell me by whining and I ignored her.  Now I barely escaped having to clean poop off the ceiling and it’s barely 9AM.

As Sloopy and Daisy settled in to caring for their puppies, I found myself becoming increasingly overwhelmed by the home schooling schedule combined with my other responsibilities.  In addition to the house and kids and puppies, I am also a massage therapist and work office hours with clients around those other tasks.  It’s a lot of…….stuff!

The program I chose for schooling for my kids at home is an online charter school that is a combination of ‘virtual’ computer work and traditional book work.  To say I was not enjoying the process would be a vast understatement. Since the pups were at ages where they were stable, and the moms were doing most of the work, I decided to pass the puppy responsibilities on to my dog-sitter (thanks Erica!).  I would take advantage of the scheduling flexibility that this type of schooling afforded, and take my kids on a trip.  We packed the camping stuff and headed to Assateague Island.

Pony on Assateague Island

Bonfire on the beach

Westwood Doodle on the Dunes!

It was a good week, although we did not stay as long as we had planned due to the arrival of a real ‘Nor’easter’ in the middle of the week.  We knew it would be arriving from conversations with the park rangers, and got off the island just as it started to rain.  I later spoke with someone who stayed (in a camper) through the storm and she said it was a good thing we tent campers headed out when we did!

It is always a little anxiety-producing when a mom whelps her first litter, and I seemed to have been going through that a lot in recent months (Reese, and Sloopy’s recent litters had also been firsts for them).  But Daisy did a great job and things went smoothly, although, of course, her litter was born in the middle of the night!  Three cream boy and two chocolate girl mini North American Retriever puppies made their appearance in the wee hours of 9/24.

Home school had started for my kids a few days after Sloopy’s litter was born, and now, a month later, Daisy’s litter was also keeping me busy.  I was spending the days alternating between working with my kids and cleaning up after moms and pups, and nights catching up on puppy applications and emails preparing new owners for the arrivals of their puppies.  September had blended in to October.

As summer was ending I did something I had never done before……whelped two litters within a month of each other!

I plan the litters at Westwood so that I never have more than two ‘on the ground’, as we say, at the same time.  Puppies are an INCREDIBLE amount of work, and I would not have the time for them, or for the investment in time that I make communicating with the families that are getting ready for their arrival.  So I have had two litters here at once before, but one litter was always within a week or so of going to new homes when the other arrived.  So all of August was spent preparing for Sloopy’s litter  to arrive at the end of August, and Daisy’s to arrive at the end of September.

In addition, it became clear as summer was coming to an end that my older son was not going to lottery in to a different middle school. The school he was at last year was a disaster, with daily fights involving tables, as well as fists, being thrown, as well as a required police presence.  We knew he could not go back there, and when he did not lottery in to a different school I had to begin plans to home school him.  I already knew I would continue to home school my younger son, but planning for schooling for two very different kids, in different grades and with very different needs, was a daunting task.

Sloopy’s puppies were born on 8/27, a litter of 5 mini Double Doodles with Beau as the father. This was Sloopy’s first litter, and it was greatly anticipated.  She did a great job!  One of the puppies was a phantom (a dark puppy with tan markings like a Doberman)

Sloopy's mini North American Retriever litter included a phantom puppy!

The puppies were a delight, and the phantom puppy ended up being the one chosen to be trained for service by WAGS4KIDS.  This was the third puppy I donated to WAGS4KIDS.  Wendy, the director of that organization, is always a joy to work with.  Her program places the puppies in the Marion Correctional Institution for training, a win-win situation for everyone.  Here is ‘Petey’ before he left for prison!

Getting ready to leave for service training by WAGS4KIDS!

Non-Doodley event....I pass my black belt test!

So it’s been a while since I posted to my blog, and I can trace back to the exact moment things turned upside down to the degree that I no longer had time to write.

5/17/09, 4PM.

I have this loft bed I built up above the whelping area, and on that Saturday I had been up there taking a nap knowing I was going to be up all night with a dog, Emma, who was in labor.  But I knocked my glasses down from the place I keep them near the loft.  I can’t see more than 2 inches without them (literally) and missed a step coming down out of the bed. I fell a distance of about 3 feet, and landed with the ball of my foot on the edge of the whelping platform, the rest of my foot and weight went 4 inches down to the ground. So I sort of ripped my foot between the first two toes. Truly amazing amount of blood at the time. Poor Gus, my nine year old,  was the only one around and he was pale seeing pools of blood and towels soaked with it.  To his credit, he did hold it together enough to help me clean my foot up a little.  But I couldn’t do anything about the injury at the time except patch it up and tough it out,  because Emma was in labor. Over the next couple days my entire foot swelled and bruised, but because I needed to stay with Emma I was not able to go to the emergency room until Monday afternoon.

I did go to the emergency room on Monday, and the doctor was pretty funny. He didn’t really examine it, it was so discolored and swollen, he just sort of touched it with his index finger, saying, “You’ve been walking on this??? Let’s just get her to xray”. He recommended staying off it for 2 weeks, which I did as much as I could and still care for 4 adult dogs, 2 kids, and a litter of puppies!

Emma’s puppies were lovely, as always, and, as always, she did a great job with them.

One very big complication regarding my injury was that I was scheduled to take my black belt test on 6/20.  The two day test is only given once a year, and I did not want to miss it.   I knew from previously blowing out the ACLs in both knees that my foot was seriously damaged.  I also know if I told anyone how badly I was injured they would not allow me to take the test.   It was nearly impossible for me to train those 6 weeks before the test….the absolutely most critical weeks of training.  But I used lots of athletic tape to hold my foot together and took the test anyway.  A week later I went for an MRI, which showed 4 torn ligaments: two full tears and two partial tears.  I was immediately put in a ‘boot cast’ for 6 weeks.  A guy I train with, who also took the black belt test during those 2 days, is an orthopedic radiologist, and he offered to give me a second opinion on the MRI.  He confirmed the findings.  He did add that there was no way I should have gotten though that black belt test.  “I’m looking at your foot, and this joint is completely unstable” was his comment. I laughed and said, ‘Well Matt, you know that sucking it up is one of the things I do best’.  And he said, ‘I have to say, this is as much sucking up as I have ever seen.  It’s unbelievable.’  REALLY scary to have a huge heavy boot around little puppies; I literally lived in fear of a misstep as it would have killed one!

So life was very complicated for a while, between trying to train for my black belt test while badly injured, and then hobbling around in a honking big boot.   EVERYTHING seemed to take forever and longer, especially to someone who mostly moves at light speed.  Summer passed into fall.