The Perfect Birthday Present

 Okay, I can finally tell you all, we added a new addition to the pack. Umbri (Umbreon of Endless Runners) has joined our ranks. She is currently 8 weeks and we can go get her on Bart's birthday, which is of course extra special. We have great hopes and dreams already for this little girl. And we hope she will fulfil them all of course. Don't we all. It's going to be fun to have a puppy coming to us at 8 weeks old.

    Most of our puppies so far come from other countries, so they have to be at least 15 weeks before they can leave and by then they're already tiny dogs and not so much puppies anymore. And till now I never really thought about what we were missing because of that. Some dogs came to us even later than that, at about 6 months and we were very lucky with how they turned out, and how they fit in with the rest of our dogs.

(Umbreon of Endless Runners ~ Umbri)

    Ever since we'd gone to our friends to see their puppies we knew we were taking her home. At first we weren't going to do it. Because there were only two females in the whole litter and we really wanted to add another female. But the breeders had said that they wanted to keep both of them.

    In the end they decided not to keep them both, but to keep only one of the females and suddenly the option of adding one of their dogs to our pack was an option again. I had shown interest in a breeding with that female before, but due to some circumstances the breeding hadn't happened. And it was put on a back burner, as we were trying for our own litter as well this year. But we didn't want to let this chance get away from us. And then we didn't.

    We really wanted to keep it a secret from our friends, as one of our other close friends was getting a puppy from that litter as well. And his pack and ours are already horribly similar. He already has 2 full brothers of two of our dogs and two half siblings, which makes it that much more fun to see how they perform against each other.

    So hopefully we can measure that again come next season, now that we added another brother/sister pair to our packs. It's fun to see how different they can become, even though they're from the same breeder and background.

Humpday?

    So when last time Zumi wasn't ready yet we were making a new appointment for her to get tested again and the vet suggested half way through next week, but we didn't want to chance it so we opted for monday instead of tuesday or wednesday, like the vet suggested and we were right. Over the weekend she had suddenly shot up 10+ points and when we went to get tested on monday she said that tuesday would be the ideal day to go and visit with her beau. 

    Which was a little sad for me because tuesday was the only day that I had to work the whole day and so Bart would have to drive to the Netherlands alone to do the breeding. Since we wouldn't make it if we left after my workday had finished, because he had to work the night shift as well that week. So I was waiting eagerly for news while I was still at work. And they were perfect, Zumi was flagging and Santos was showing a lot of interest and they tied in the most uncomfortable place in the yard. I heard lots of dogs do that. They were there for about 10 minutes and that was that. 

(Zumi and Santos getting along)

    Just to be sure we drove on wednesday as well. Though we noticed immediately that they weren't as interested as they had been yesterday. It was a lot harder for them both to stand still and in the end there was only a slip tie. But they both reacted the same way they had the day before, so we were hopeful. Before we drove home we had already made an appointment for Zumi to get her echo, in 28 days. Which makes it April 14th. It's a long wait but we're hopeful that it worked. It was for everybody the first time. So fingers crossed. 

    I am scared and excited. Two people who were on our waiting list cancelled. One opted for another litter that had already been born, because there isn't any certainty that Zumi will even have puppies at this time. And for the other this wasn't the ideal time to add a new puppy to the family. Which is both very understandable of course, but it does make me a bit nervous. Where before we had a full waitlist now there are suddenly falling holes. And with the litter that Zumi comes from in the back of our minds, it would have been better to have a few people on the list. The litter she comes from was 9 puppies. Ha.. ha. 

    But who knows, let's not get ahead of ourselves just yet. According to google Huskies usually get litters between the 4 and 6 pups, which should be doable. Though there are a lot of litters being bred this year. Mostly because this is the ideal setting to be missing a female. No shows, races, trails or anything else to go to with the dogs, so it's not a disaster if puppies are born and the female is out of the running for a little while. 

Handling disappointment

     This one is also too late, not because I was procrastinating, but because I was waiting for some hopefully interesting news. 

    I was waiting to talk about Zumi and how her progesteron tests were good and we had gone to do the breeding. But that didn't happen, her progesteron is rising, but not at the speeds that we had thought. In the times before we didn't really keep track, because she was to young to breed anyway. So we just kept her inside for a month and spoiled her rotten. And that was that. So we go back for another test on monday and we'll see where that gets us. Waiting it hard. But there is nothing more we can do at this moment.

     Friends of ours have a litter of puppies. They're about 6 weeks by now and those have cause serious puppyfever around here.

I had also planned to talk about the Iditarod, how, because all our own races have been canelled I would live vicariously through some of my favorite mushers, people who I look up to and have been following for some time. 

    One of those mushers, Aliy Zirkle had announced that this was her last Iditarod and so I had her pecked for the win, because I had done that for the last couple of years. But she had to scratch, because she got hurt on the trail. Which was of course way worse for her than it was for me, but it just shows how things can pile up a little. She is still an amazing woman and I am in awe that she still mushed her dogs into the checkpoint with her injuries. But that wasn't the story I wanted to write about. 

   I just poured myself a cup of tea and am watching the live stream of the Iditarod in a separate window here. And it kind of makes me miss our own races.  

    I think I've talked about this a bit in an earlier post. But this past season (if there had been a season the last race would already have been run by now) would have been the first season that we would've had an entire 6 dog team, able to run. All of our active dogs are younger than 3 and most even younger than 2 years old. 

    We were looking into starting off in the tour distances in our races, which are between the 12 km and the 15 km roughly. Where as the sprint races are between 4- and 7 km. Part of our team would've been too young for some, so maybe it was some kind of blessing to have to wait another year. Funny how writing blogs can sometimes make you see things in another light. 

    But actually the most important thing we were training towards was our trip to Sweden, which would have been in the first two weeks of February. I can only really speak for myself when I say that cancelling that trip took the fight out of my for a bit there. And it took some time to get back to where I am now, slowly building new habits and getting back into old habits. And I've seen the same thing in our training with the dogs. We hit the major landmark we wanted to hit and then we kind of, stopped. 

    But slowly and surely we'll crawl back up, hug the dogs a lot and hopefull have good news about Zumi in the next few weeks, so we can have a little kick in the butt to get us started again. I realize that this blog is not really about handling disappointment, but just about that we keep on going, even though some things happen and we have no say in it. And although it seems like the world has been on hold for a little over a year now, we can't just stop. We need to keep moving forward. 

Report to Sickbay!

    Dammit dogs, i'm a cleaning lady, not a doctor. (I am sorry, my Trekkie is showing.)

    But not everything is always fun and games. Sometimes things happen, fights, accidents, you name it. And when things happen we let those dogs inside.

    Our Kesha has been inside since Christmas last year, when she went into heat just over the holidays and because we still have some intact males we just don't want to risk them being together in the same place.

    Then she was done being in heat she got a wound on her head. We think from a loose board in one of the dog houses. It's been fixed since then. But when we thought it was okay to let her back out again, we noticed a hot spot. And none of our other dogs are as prone to hot spots as she is. And, so, she got to stay inside a little more. And just when one hot spot started to heal, we noticed another one, and we had to go to the vet because we just didn't know what to do at this point. The vet thought that she maybe she reached one of the hot spots and had started licking it, and then cleaning herself in other places and had spread it that way. That the hot spot started bacterial, but had become some somehow fungal over time. So, she got to stay inside a little longer. 

    When Kesha was almost ready to return to the pack our eldest, Keyla, probably had gotten one of her nails stuck somewhere and had pulled, it wasn't loose or anything but she had gotten some inflammation on her toe from licking it. So she got to be inside, all bootied up.

    Later that week our German Shepherd got into a fight with one of our younger males, and lost, so he had a nice scratch under one of his eyes, so we wanted to watch it for a few days and disinfect it good, before he went back outside. And just as he was ready to go back outside..

  Zumi's heat appeared and she got to come inside, luckily not for anything bad, but again, we don't want to risk the males and females together. And also we want to breed her this heat cycle, if everything works out, so fingers crossed. And maybe some week soon I will have something way more exciting to announce than just that animals get sick.

Spring Cleaning

     With last post my schedule was already wacky, but with me procrastinating on the blog the last few weeks it's even wackier. But that doesn't matter, there is enough to write about.

    After the week of winter we had there came a week of summer, and all the dogs we were starting to shed, inhaled deep and drew all those hairs back in, or so it seemed. Which leaves us with dogs who are back in their winter coat and nice spring temperatures. It was great and bitter sweet at the same time, because it means that my favorite season is over, but the hiking season is just beginning. 

    Funny story about the place where we went hiking. There is a real life sled dog training area, we think it goes all the way around the forest, but we don't know for sure. In a few weeks we will probably go back and try to hike the whole sled dog training path. So we can see if it's something we will use next season, or maybe a few times, depending on how long it actually is. 

    When we got back home we decided to put away the mushing stuff for this season. I took apart all the lines and put them in the washing machine, together with all the dogs harnesses. We do hose them down from time to time if we had an especially muddy training, to avoid chafing, but we only really wash them once a year, at the end of the season.

    It's always fun to see that the harnesses didn't actually change colour, but that they were just very, very dirty. 

    When you watch the lines you can almost see how many years we've been doing this, or at least with more than two dogs. The blue lines were our first 4-dog lines. Then we got red ones and the black with the reflecting pieces through them. And at the start of this season we got the orange/black ones with solid black neck lines and tug lines. The pink ones are my two-dog lines for when I go with the kickbike. Before our 4 dogs lines, we had two seasons where we mainly used two dogs and back then we had an orange two-dog line. But I believe we gave that one away. It's almost looking at rings in a tree when looking at these lines. 

    

    We've also put our vehicles up for the summer, or at least until we need to start patching them up again for the fall training and later for winter, because we've booked our vacation to Sweden for next year. There are some nice projects stacked here. Like; the wiring of our quad is okay, we just need to add a battery and we could use the lights, which is very, very useful because we usually train when it's still dark. And the runners of the sleds need replacing, or at least some work, there is still so much to learn, especially because we live in a country where snow is almost non-existing.

    It's always kind of a sad time when we need to put everything away. But it's also a time for trying new things and getting other projects started. I look forward to what will happen this off-season. 

One week of Winter

     The reason that this post is late, later than I wanted to, is because I wasn't ready to put an end to this piece of winter we've been having. 

    But with the temperatures rising, almost 20 degrees celcius more than last week, all the snow and ice melted away, and the first spring flowers showing their heads. I thinkg there is no way that I can keep denying it. Spring is coming. 

    It was a week, only one week and in that week we did a lot. It started on Saturday with a little light snow, not yet enough to do anything with, but by the next day we were in the forest and had taken the kick spark with us

    It was fun and another thing that made me feel just like a real musher was that, finally, all the dog poop in the dog yard was frozen, into the snow. It seemed fun at first, I mean, who doesn't want their dog poop to be so solid? Until I realized that it would just melt into the snow and then freeze stuck again. Yay for slashing poop, instead of just scooping it.

    The dogs all had a crazy amount of energy, even our old lady Keyla, who turns 10 this year turned frisky again when the temperatures fell below zero. Which was really fun to see. 

    But even that couldn't stop the snowy fun we were having. The roads were a disaster and people in Belgium really can't handle their snow, but that didn't stop us from having fun in the forest. In some places I drove faster with my mountain bike than some people in their cars. It was a shame that they started to throw salt around right the minute it started snowing, so the streets weren't filled with snow. 

    One of the things on my personal bucket list is that I can get to work with the dogs and sled, just so I can say I've done it once. When there is even a little chance of snow people start getting scared that they can't go anywhere. And my clients start getting scared that I can't get to work. I always say that even if there is a lot of snow I can still make it, I just take the dog sled. The same is true for my partner. His bosses always threaten him that if all the roads are closed due to snow and he's the only one who can come to work he has to do everything on his own. But sadly, this year is also not the year we can go to work by dog sled. 

    It has been such a strange season. We thought, without cliché-ing that the 2020/2021 season would become our year. We would have 6 adult, Siberians who really wanted to work. Not including our 2 oldest Siberians, who we could come out with in the Happy Dog class. We'd finally decided that we wouldn't be participating in the dryland sprint races, but try to go towards the 'tour' class. So we'd started to up the distance in our training rounds and lower the speed. We'd calculated which distances we'd need to reach by which race. But then all the races were cancelled. 

    And these first two weeks of February we would've been in Sweden to sled with the dogs. Which also got cancelled. I myself got a little discouraged because of it, but this week of winter in our own country was a small band aid on that wound. We booked again for next year, so maybe the 2021/2022 season will be 'our' season. 

(📸 by Christel Michiels)

    Then just a mere week after we took the Kick Spark out, and right about the time that I started to get used to all the snow covered fields. We had one training earlier this week where we couldn't even take the sled out, because there wasn't enough snow on some of the paths, so we had to take the quad. 

    On the 14th of February we went out early in the morning, because we knew that everything would start to thaw. And yes, the next day, all the snow was gone the seasons seemed to change from winter to spring instantly. 

Test, Test, Test!

    Early this year we got our kennel name 'Keshumi's Pride' but late last year we'd already started with adding one of our dogs Zumi (Kazumi Anana Amarok) to the Belgian kennel club KMSH-SRSH, because most of our dogs are imports from Poland. 

(Zumi ~ Kazumi Anana Amarok)

    So first thing we had to do was change her pedigree from the export pedigree we had to one that was added to the Belgian kennel club. We did a DNA test for her at the same time so they had that in their database as well. If we wanted to breed a litter with her we had to do the DNA test anyway, to prove that she's the mother. So we did in beforehand (also spreads the costs). The first time they couldn't find enough DNA in the tube/on the cotton swab, so we got sent another test and had to do it again, and it took, so now she was in the Belgian Database and we had her DNA-profile. 

    The next step was getting her tested for any eye diseases, they are only valid for a year so we had to figure out when it would be a good time to get the tests. Since Zumi was quite regular (every 6 months), until Ygritte went into heat only 3 months after Zumi's last heat and she joined her again (can I hear a yay for multiple intact females in one group *sarcasm*). So we didn't know and decided to do the test in december of 2020 just to be sure we would be on time. We also decided that we would do the eye tests before the hips, because if something was wrong with her eyes we wouldn't be able to breed with her anyway, and the eye tests were less expensive than the hip tests. She came back clear on everything. So that was one more test down, one more to go. 

(Zumi ~ Kazumi Anana Amarok)

    The appointment to do x-rays of her hips was scheduled for early January 2020 and our own vet could do them, which is always a big plus. Since we don't have to drive far, like we had to for the eye tests. The tests were send out directly to the University in Ghent where they would grade them. We later heard that they only did this about once a month so we went on crossing everything that Zumi wouldn't decide to go in heat before we got all the tests back. 

    Then late this week we got a call from our vet, the University had send the results back to him, instead of to us. He started pulling Bart's leg by saying that he had bad news, but in the end he had to come clean and announced that everything was perfect;

ED left: 0
ED right: 0 

HD: A

    And now the waiting continues, only this time until she will be in heat. *fingers crossed*