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.