Doodle Doings

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.

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)

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!

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.

I will use this chat site when I am streaming whelpings online! Click on the link below, and then click on the orange ‘chat’ button. You will be automatically logged in as a ‘guest’ (no need to register or sign in!) and if I am there with puppies you can see!

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well, not really. But it did occur to me that was what happened when I awoke to this last week:

I have two litters of puppies right now. They are both in my puppy area, affectionately known as ‘Puppyland’, which consists of two rooms with a hallway in between. Each mom and litter has its own room, with dutch doors leading to the hallway from each room. I installed dutch doors so I can step over the lower halves to get in and out of the rooms, rather than opening the doors. This is much simpler than trying to slip through an open door faster than a litter of quicksilver puppies. And getting over those doors a hundred or so times every day helps keep me flexible for martial arts!

About a week ago Rouge started acting restless, and I thought maybe she was just getting ‘cabin fever’. She would act like she wanted to follow me around as I did my chores throughout the house and yard, but as soon as she was away from her puppies she would ask to go back to Puppyland. It seemed she just couldn’t make up her mind what she wanted.

One evening it occurred to me that maybe she just wanted more options, needed a little more ‘space’ from the puppies. So even though the puppies are in a whelping pen that Rouge hops in and out of, so she is not in contact with them unless she chooses it, I decided to leave both dutch doors from her room open to the hall. I closed both dutch doors leading to Reese and her puppies, as I never let dogs have access to another mom’s puppies. I know two breeders that have lost whole litters when moms fought over their puppies. So even though Rouge and Reese are good friends, and wander in and out of both rooms, checking on each other’s puppies when I am there, I would never risk having them near each other’s litters unsupervised.

I came down in the morning to the scene pictured above. Both of those dutch doors had been closed and latched; Rouge destroyed the lower door trying to get IN to Reese’s puppies. I realized at that moment why Rouge had been so restless. The sound of puppies triggered in her the need to care for them, and she couldn’t reach them. It didn’t matter that they were not her puppies, that they were being cared for by Reese, or that she had her own litter to care for. She could hear puppies and NEEDED to take care of them. Hormonal Destructodog.

It brought home for me once again how powerfully hormones will drive a dog. It is something new breeders usually find out the hard way. Female dogs are called ‘bitches’ for a reason, and the reason is how they can behave towards other intact females when they are in season. Even girls that have been raised as littermates and friends will fight bitterly when they are in season. Their hormones tell them that they need to drive away all other females to compete for the best mate, and they will do that. Intact males will do anything, and I do mean anything, to get to a female in season. I know one boy who went through a second story window, twice, to get out of the house to a female in season. And the window was closed both times.

So it is one of the wonders of breeding to see how much behavior is influenced by reproductive hormones. And it makes me wonder how much of human behavior is driven similarly without our realizing it!

To get to my house!

Yesterday was one of those glorious spring days. Temperature near 70, sunny, and, while rain was in the near future, it wasn’t here yet so my yard was not a mud pit. Time to get some of the gardening done! Marley and Daisy were in the yard (outside the garden fence…GOOD GIRLS!) playing with a plastic horseshoe they had dug from the trash. In a very un-Marley like moment, Marley burst through the garden fence and charged the back fence at the easement, roaring furiously. She is generally very laidback, I looked up to see what could possibly have set her off. A chicken.

Now, this is not the first time we have seen chickens in the area, despite the fact that we are smack dab in the middle of a major urban center. A neighbor about a block down has a flock. About once a year a small cadre escapes and I see them on the street in the front of my house. I usually herd them back down the street with a broom. It does seem like an awfully long walk for a chicken.

But this was the first time I had seen one in the back. I trapped her in the corner of a fence, and she actually was pretty tame, much more than I had remembered from previous encounters. This should have been my first clue. As I tucked her under my arm I catch a flash of white from the corner of my eye. Oh my. Two more chickens….a white one and a black one. No way I could catch them, I only had one hand free because the other had a chicken in it! I told my younger son, who was working outside with me, to stand and make sure renegade chickens did not get past him as they were basically trapped unless they wanted to fight their way past him. I walked the block down the easement to Ann’s place. Although she was not home, a bunch of chickens were, in a coop with a sign on it that said, “When chickens are outlawed, only outlaws will have chickens.” I checked all around the coop and couldn’t determine an illicit exit point for a chicken. It occurred to me this was not THIS chicken’s home. What would happen if I put a chicken in with a bunch of strange chickens? I didn’t know, and didn’t want to find out. I headed to the front of the house, still carrying the chicken, when someone pulled into the driveway. A woman got out of her truck and said, “Oh man….did my mom’s chickens get out again?” “I don’t know. I couldn’t find how this one would have gotten out.” We walked back, Jenny counted the chickens and said, “Nope, all seven are here, that one is not ours. And besides, ours would never let you hold them like that!” Great. A homeless….but friendly…….. chicken.

We went back to my house to find my son in tears. Marley and Daisy, excited at the prospect of dinner on the fly, had jumped our fence into the easement. Gus, using remarkably good judgment for a nine year old, realized he was more responsible for the dogs than for the chickens, and managed to lift both dogs (25 and 40 lbs!) back up and over our fence. While his back was turned, the two chickens had disappeared.

I put the captive chicken in the bathroom, sent Gus back to walk along the easement in back, while I decided to walk along the street in front. I had barely gotten to the end of my driveway when a police car pulled up. I hardly ever see police cars on our street, and I must have a guilty conscience because having him pull in my driveway really set off some anxiety. He says, “Did you call us?” “Uhhhhhh….no. Should I have called you?” “Someone called us. Is there something going on around here?” “Well, there are some lost chickens loose, but I’m thinking you’re not asking about chickens.” This brought a roar of laughter, and was clearly the high point of his day. ” No, not chickens. Someone called and said someone in a silver Milano was driving up and down hitting people up for drug money. Call us if you see anything.” “Yes, sir.”

A half hour of searching revealed that a neighbor on the other side of the easement, a few houses down, had gotten chickens a several months earlier. They were still getting the hang of it. I returned their chicken from my bathroom, the other two were found hiding behind a pile of mulch. A happy ending this time!

A discussion of factors involved in balancing the risk of parvo virus infection in young puppies versus the need for socialization.

See more at http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/1533933/balancing_parvo_risk_and_the_need_for.html

I answer questions every day from people considering buying my puppies. Getting to know people virtually is great fun, and it is then almost like a reunion if I get to meet them in real life when they pick up their puppy. We often stay in contact for years, with pictures as the puppy grows, holiday cards and updates.

It is a particular joy to work with first-time dog owners. Of course, getting a puppy is a big event in anyone’s life, but especially so for someone who has never had a dog because they are allergic to dogs and thought it would never be possible. Or for someone who grew up with dogs but then had a child who is allergic to dogs and they have avoided getting a dog for that reason. So the fact that I can bring the joy of a non-allergenic puppy into the life of someone who thought they could never experience that is an experience I treasure.

Everyone is a novice at some time, in something. I tell people all the time that there is no shame at starting at the beginning, and I encourage people to ask any and all questions that occur to them. I believe that the more questions they ask and the more answers they get, the more prepared they will be when their new addition arrives. Of course everyone has heard stories about things puppies or dogs might do. “My Dog Marley” has been a great asset in terms of starting the conversation about what you might experience when you have a dog. One of my favorite questions is, “Will s/he chew?” I always send this picture in answer to that question:

Yes, your puppy will chew! And they will grow out of it. This little devil is Rouge, who has grown up to be a perfect companion, and spends her days schmoozing at a tennis club with her guardian.

The other picture I send to give them a dose of reality with these:

I am afraid I have occasionally scared off buyers with my graphic honesty about the realities of having a puppy in one’s life. That might not be an altogether bad thing. Although it might cost me a sale in the short run, I think it is worth it in the long run if it prevents a family from taking on a puppy when they are not ready. Timing, and preparation, means mean the difference between failure and success!

And success is sweet:

Westood Labradoodles, Goldendoodles, and North American Retrievers : my website!

The Doodle Zoo: The Ultimate Online, Offleash Dogpark:  A wonderful, friendly, informative discussion forum comprised of Doodle Owners, Doodle Breeders, and Doodle afficienados.  Surf over and introduce yourself!

International Doodle Owners Group (IDOG):  The first, last and every word in between Doodle Information Source.  Information about Doodle Rescue, selecting a Doodle breeder, Doodle Growth and training and more.

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