It has been a very hectic couple of months. Mid-April saw Sinco come into heat, finally after waiting since October for that to happen! Then the mad-dash to decide how to get her to Canada to be bred. I had planned to do AI when I thought it was going to be a winter breeding but now the weather was better. I was doing the progesterone tests and it was starting to look like she was going to peak on a weekend which makes doing AI riskier. It can end up being done too early and too late. I looked up airfares and decided it would cost the same to send her on a plane with Myra and then in a rental car. So off they went to a small town 5 hours drive north of Vancouver. Sinco was great and two breedings took place.
Then Sinco came back and ran great at our April NADAC trial. The weather was chilly and damp but our spirits were not dampened and many of us wore our Hawaiian Shirts to show Mother Nature we would persevere. I ran Sinco, Spring and Feisty. Spring ran great all weekend. Sinco ran like a champ. Feisty had a blast with the wide open courses.
Then the first week of May my father fell and broke his hip the day before his 82nd birthday. He lives in North Carolina. He had been living alone since my mother died a year earlier. He had been doing alright on his own. He had surgery on his birthday and then a couple of days later was admitted into a rehab nursing home. He has been there ever since. He lost a lot of cognitive functioning through the ordeal and he is no longer able to read or write well, dress himself or even eat without help. Before this happened he was almost completely deaf so that doesn't help matters.
The following week Susan Perry came to town and put on an awesome seminar! She is great and I heard lots of positive feedback from it. Things were difficult with my Dad and I wasn't getting good information from the nursing home so I had to go to North Carolina in the middle of Susan's seminar. I was disappointed to have missed most of it. However it was good to go on the trip.
Then we had an ultrasound on Sinco and they heard NINE heartbeats! Wow that is a lot more than I was expecting! But it was nice to hear good news for a change!
Then I get back from that trip and have to head out the following weekend to supervise judge in Florida for two days. It was at this point that I decided to resign from judging for ASCA and to resign from doing course reviews. I just have too much going on with the school, my father and the puppies on the way.
Friday night I went to St. Peter to do an obedience run through with Feisty in Open. She did well and she did things I expected. She is rough around the edges and definitely not polished. However she is not the kind of dog I can drill or overtrain. I have her entered one day at the Lake Minnetonka obedience trial on June 12th.
Now this weekend I have been able to run my own dogs. Tay is making her re-debut after being in rehab for a strained/slightly torn triceps tendon that happened at the end of January. She is physically looking very good. Unfortunately today the folks in the tent next to me started grilling their lunch. Tay was freaked and incredibly stressed out by the smell of the smoke. The wind blew the smell all across the agility rings. I was able to get her to calm down enough that she was able to somewhat run in the ring farthest away. She ran better after they were done grilling and the smell had cleared. I did so much work on it last year and now to feel like I'm back at square one with it is disheartening. Feisty was a bit squirrelly today. Spring however had a very good novice standard run. He is still a bit tentative on contacts he doesn't know and his striding was not the best since he was thinking hard about them. He did have a clean run in standard and he had a great FAST run. We had a back jump in novice JWW but otherwise the run was great. He did very well for his debut in AKC standard.
Now to spend the next couple of weeks getting ready for puppies that are due between June 15-19! I have a very busy summer ahead of me!
