It’s the Holiday Season!
The Holiday Season is upon us.  With Thanksgiving behind us and the celebration of Christmas upcoming, it is always a busy time of the year.  Here at the farm, it is no different.  In our last report, we mentioned the late summer lull.  We anticipated the next round of puppies to arrive in the November time frame.  Well, nature tends to do things its own way sometimes!  We can finally confidently pinpoint the arrival of our next round of litters.  We expect 5 litters to arrive during the month of January, starting with Rose, followed by Lula, Iris, and Phoenix, with Nadia bringing up the rear.  Another wild card is Mylah.  She is always an anomaly with her heat cycles, and this time is no different.  At first we believed her to be pregnant, with pups arriving in early December.  We backed off on that prediction and thought she would then be another couple of months out.
Today, we are back to wondering.  We will call her a possibility at this point, but cannot say for sure.  It would simply be a nice added bonus!

Synched Heat Cycles
Over the years, we’ve read and heard that animals have a tendency to sync their cycles when more than one are present.  It’s simply in the natural order of competition.  We are officially witnessing this on a large scale!  In addition to those mentioned above, Aleu, Josie, Ice, Skye, Luna, River, and Willow all also had their heat cycles!  We needed to skip all of these cycles, so it was a challenge to say the least!

King Mini-Crack and his Loyal Henchmen
The 4 pups that are currently not involved with the breeding and heat cycle process are Xander, Ellie, Ziva, and Quinn.  They are still too young to participate.  Xander, whom we’ve dubbed “King Mini-Crack”, is close, but not yet reliable.  Next time around he will likely have pups.  Xander is A LOT like Kallen.  He is likely to take over the “Crackhead” title from Kallen as Kallen ages.  Xander is one active dog!  Ellie, Ziva, and Quinn are very active as well. But they are just pups being pups.  They are not on Xander’s level by any stretch!

Quinn
We are still awaiting the trade for our new pup for Quinn.  They are from Alabama, and are just now having a new litter.  We are after an Agoutti pup, and this is likely to be the litter that provides that. 

The Waiting List
With delays in nature, and the synching of the heat cycles, it seems as if things are moving toward periods of a LOT of puppies and NO puppies.  If things continue to move in that direction, we figure that around every 6 months we will have 6-8 litters within a month of each other!  This is never an issue with raising them, nor selling them.  However it can cause issues with lengthy waiting lists!  What is very important to understand is that we have little or no control over nature.  Please anticipate a waiting period when deciding to adopt a pup.

Zach’s Huskies
In our last report, I mentioned that Zach has his ongoing FFA project with his own Huskies.  Lula and Luna are an integral part of this project.  I also mentioned the new website that will be unveiled, and I can say it is now almost complete!  It will likely be unveiled around the first of the year.  Zach has worked hard on it with our help and guidance, and it is really starting to turn out nice!  Here is a little taste…J

Project update
The list of projects seems to grow daily, but they are coming along.  Much is going on now behind the scenes to become State Certified and Licensed.  Winter never makes things easy, and most years we don’t accomplish much during the Winter.  This year we will push through.  We need to be ready to pour cement by Spring!  Heather meanwhile, has the daunting task of the mountains of paperwork that is associated with bureaucracy.  

A humorous anecdote…
Lately, we’ve noticed that Miya barks for seemingly no apparent reason.  For fairly long periods of time.  I got curious, so one day while she was in the barn barking endlessly, I snuck up to see if there was a particular reason.  When I peeked in, I saw her chasing her tail (and barking at it)!  She apparently goes for an hour at a time doing this.  Whatever keeps her happy!

One Final Note
We want to take this time to wish everyone a very Merry Christmas, and Blessed New Year.  Thanks to everyone for making us who we are today!  This year, we stepped away from our normal Christmas Cards, simply due to scheduling.  We hope to return to this again next year.