Time seems to be slipping away so fast this summer, I decided to blame the weather and not my age. =) The summer this year seems so short like it never really happened, only a few days were warm enough to be considered a summer day. Quite disappointing. I have a feeling that we are in for a long colder than normal winter.On July 4th, Gretchen gave birth to 8 beautiful puppies and for once we had 3 different coat colors. The only chocolate girl was sold when she was only a few days old to a family in Louisiana. The only cream puppy is going to a soldier stationed at Ft. Lewis. A couple others to families closer to home. Now they are nine weeks old and we are hoping to place the remaining four soon. They are so much fun at this age, we let them run around chasing and playing with each other and playing peek-a-boo around the furniture. This photo is Bear holding the 3 big boys of each color, he is scruning up his face because the puppies kept licking his face.
On August 12th, Emma gave birth to another 8 tiny puppies. She did a 2,2,2,2 thing with the puppies, there are 2 black girls, 2 cream girls, 2 black boys and 2 cream boys. Everything quite even with her. The smaller cream girl has been selected to be our first puppy in a guardianship program. We are going to keep her until she has her adult teeth and is potty trained because she is going on the road with my son M, the truck driver. He also has allergies to cats and dogs so this will be a great companion for him while he is on the road. Her name is Tawnee, which by some definitions means light tan or brightness and is German in origin. All our dogs have German names and our son is carrying on the tradition.
I don't know if I every wrote about the reason we pick German names for our dogs yet. Simply put, our last name is of German origin. Also, Poodles were developed in Germany and Labradors too. It has been kind of interesting also to look up names to consider if the fit a dogs personality. For example, Fritz was the first dog my husband and I named together and we rolled around names for a couple days after we brought him home. Fritz was very proud right from the beginning and pranced around in a trot, never a gallop. Prince would have been an excellent name, but it is pretty over used. A local radio jockey had just become a father for the first time and he and his wife named their son Fritz. I thought it fitted Fritz's personality perfectly. My husband liked it also because it went with his German family name. Personality, I just like everything to match and if one dog had a certain type of name, then they all had to. Soon after we brought Fritz home, we picked out our first 2 girls and we had a few names picked out. Gretchen was Gretchen right from the beginning warm and spunky. I selected Hiedi because she was so curly even at 2 weeks of age and reminded me of Shirley Temple. That's were I got the name for our breeding program, Curly Top was a name of a Shirley Temple movie.
