Until I get a little Zen in my life.

In the meantime, I’ve been busy. Besides two jobs, kids and other bits of busiesss… I’ve been cleaning up loose ends to get ready for being a dog owner.  We have a new vet.  Dr. Atton of Felton Veterinary hospital. Brian interviewed him on Monday and he seems perfect. Zen will go for her first check up with him the Thursday after she arrives.

We got pet insurance. I did quite a bit of research of companies but decided to go on the recommendation of our breeder. We went with PetFirst Healthcare. There is some interesting debate about whether or not pet insurance is driving the costs of pet health care up … in the same the way human insurance companies are.  Many breeders are against it for this reason, and recommend instead.. that you put away the same amount of money you would use for premiums into a savings account. But I read some horror stories of puppy owners who were waiting for their pending insurance to go into affect and then discovered some big congenital health problem. I don’t expect that with Zen, but it did scare me enough to want to have some protection.

And we signed up for Puppy Classes. Our first session will start July 9th when she is 10.5 weeks old. We decided to go to Sirius in Los Gatos. It was more expensive than our friend’s school Living with Dogs in Santa Cruz.. but we chose it because they allow kids as young as three to attend, where the santa cruz school required that kids be as old as six. We’re excited about it and signed up for their complete puppy program. Six weeks starting at 10.5 weeks, with a two month break in between… and then we’ll start up again for another 6 weeks in October. Sirius mainly subscribes to the Ian Dunbar guide of off leash/lure reward system. (It is his school after all..) They give homework, charts to make sure you keep track with socialization, and a manual for easy reference.

Here’s a little Ian for ya.

Sit Zen, Sit. Good girl.

Meet our new pup. Blue eyed Zen. A different kind of Swissy, for a different kind of family. Our breeder describes her as a really confident pup, who would do well as a single dog.. but very sweet and easy to handle.

We have decided to name her Zen Pixie. Zen for most everything, only adding the Pixie when she’s being naughty.

Can’t wait to meet you little girl.

Airline tickets are bought, so I feel safe enough to show photos of our litter. Here are the little darlings at 6 weeks. One of the girls in this batch will be ours, and brian will be flying out to his home state to pick her up on June 21st.

Here they are at 5 weeks. This was a “Z” litter for the breeder, and while the jury is still out as to a theme, it did throw a kink into our naming plans. Maiwenn for the longest time wanted the name the dog Tinker Bell. God, no! I was determined to thwart this. For  awhile I had her talked down off the cliff by compromising and saying we could name the dog Pixie. But then when we found out the dog was coming from a “Z” litter.. well. That’s kind of special isn’t it?  A “z” name just hit us like lightening the other day.  It seems really appropriate considering everything this dog search has given me during this difficult time.  We still need to meet her to make sure it’s going to fit, so I will hold off in revealing it quite yet.

Here they are at 4 weeks.

Next week is the last week before they get to go home to their new owners. Our breeder said she’ll be posting individual puppy photos then, and probably figuring out who’s going home with who. She probably be evaluating their temperaments and giving them their final series of shots.

Its been a long journey trying to find one of these guys, but the search is over.  Now the truly hard work is going to begin. A friend and I were lamenting how in a big way, this process for me has been very analogous to all that time preparing for the birth of my first child. All the hours, researching… more researching..anticipating..joining message groups.. networking… stressing and then finally getting to the point of having one. I remember that morning in the hospital holding Maiwenn in my arms and thinking “now what?”  But we learned fast. And i feel we are more prepared for this learning curve than we were parenthood. It’s going to be fun. I can’t wait!

The last of the list. We are not in a huge hurry to work on the dog yard. Our current fencing is 5 feet and will hold the pup while it’s small, so we figure we can work on this over the course of the next 8 months.

The only thing that really needs to get done in the next two weeks is the crate door that will be for under our bed.

We are ready!

I have been pretty quiet in the last few weeks about our potential puppy, but I can confirm we have put a deposit down on one. The litter is about 6 weeks old now. It is a litter of 8 and according to our breeder, our puppy will be one out of 3 girls. She’s been awesome at answering questions, and she’s been sending weekly photos of the litter.

I dont feel comfortable posting pictures of the litter yet, and probably wont until our puppy is confirmed and it is cleared thru our breeder. We are waiting to hear back about her protocol for pickup when flying in on an airplane. I’ve been researching airlines and what carriers can work under the seat, and what is required to bring a dog on a plane. So much effort for a little puppy! But we know it will be worth it.

We have an appointment to interview a vet we want to use. His name is Dr. Robert Atton of Felton Veterinary Hospital. He’s been a local vet for many years and I know first hand he has a few Swissy clients. Brian has an appointment on Monday to just sit and ask him questions, just to make sure he will be a willing partner and we jive with his practices.

It’s funny… Brian made a funny comment about it when he wrote to tell me he made the appointment. Here’s what he wrote:

“I called. The lady I talked to was surprised by such an appointment before we even have the pup. But, she’s going to talk to the doc and get back to us with a time.

We follow all this good advice, and yet it seems everywhere we go people don’t do what we’re doing at all…

Le sigh.“

It’s true. Every thing we have done, has seemed to be judged in excess by other people. Honestly, through this whole process we have been trying to do the right thing. We have tried to research, we have tried to be discriminate, we have tried to do right by this future family member. The first breeder I ever talked to, Maria Jenson.. she said something to me in that first email that I will never forget.

She said: “You get the kind of dog you deserve.”

What kind of dog, do WE deserve do you suppose?

1) Not a perfect one. – We are not perfect, so we don’t deserve a perfect dog.
2) A loving dog maybe? – Yes. We have done all of this searching in Love.
3)A dog with a sense of humor? – MOST DEFINITELY.
4) A healthy dog? –I would hope so.
5) A persistent.. maybe slightly obsessive dog? Uh oh..No.. um. Yes? Maybe? *she says meekly*

Other than that.. I cannot say. Except… we are so excited to finally meet this pup, whoever she may be.

We are finally at the point where we can do actual puppy preparation! We had decided from the beginning that the best place to set up the long term puppy confinement space would be under the TV in the living room. But before we could we needed to move some outlets. Also, because of the outlet location, we had all of our media center wires exposed and those needed to be stowed away so the pup isn’t inspired to electrocute itself.

So this weekend, brian took all of Sunday to do the electrical work. He dismantled the media center and turned off the power. It required working under the house and drilling thru our floor on the other side of the wall, but finally he was able to mount the outlets inside the cabinetry itself.

Once outlets were installed, it was just a matter of slowly putting everything back together in a way that was organized and could fit inside the cabinet.

He had made a door for the cabinet awhile back but had never put it on. He did that, and then got our old baby gate fencing we use to have around the wood stove when the kids were babies. Voila! The perfect Puppy Pen!

The kids thought it was fun too. Today its a fort. Hopefully in 3 weeks, it will be a new home.

We are getting down to the wire with the List. Brian liked how this worked so much, he decided to make a permanent chalkboard so we can write notes and make other lists for things that need to be done around the house.

The biggest item on our original List by far… was cleaning out the Guest Room. Over the past year, it has been the dumping ground for everything under the sun and if people wanted to stay there, they’d have to sleep next to crates upon crated, stacked chairs and tubs of all sorts of CRAP.

It’s been a huge monkey on Brian’s back and something he’s been wanting to address for a long time. So we are finally doing it!

Look at all this stuff. This was just what was piled in the closet and the overflow into the room.

And that’s not all! Here’s most of what was piled onto the futon and near the bed. This is all stuff we plan on giving away or selling. Most of it is going to Freecycle or craigslist.. but there are boxes and boxes of old kid’s clothes that we are going to try to turn in to our local second hand store.

Thinning down feels great! As you can tell from Brian’s face here:

It will feel awesome to have our guest room back, and not feel embarrassed when friends want to come and stay. Most importantly, it’s one more thing that allows us more time to devote to our new addition and not feel like we have other responsibilities hanging over our head. We are so close now… we can TASTE it.

“Nambian Elephant Dusting” by Eric Wilson

I had a lot of good support from my friends over the last few days and it has been great! So i got up, dusted my self off and started the whole process over again. I’m taking an advisor’s advice and casting a wider net this time around, instead of focusing on just one semi-local breeder. I’m not sure how this is going to “look” to them however. It might look flaky and it might appear we lack commitment. But considering all the factors involved, and considering I haven’t really found anybody who has committed to my family? I think it’s only fair to keep open until it is absolutely apparent that I have found our “breeder match.” We may end up with one that we’ve already started a relationship with.. or we may not. I’m open either way.

I emailed a breeder that the last one recommended, but the kennel hasn’t returned my email. This wouldn’t phase me but I’ve actually emailed an application to this one before and they didn’t return my email then either. I might give them a call over the weekend just to satisfy my curiosity.

In the meantime, I’ve been given a few other recommendations from some friends and I have already started the process by emails and phone conversations. It looks promising! My wider net includes a representative from three different regions of America: East Coast, Midwest and West Coast. I’ve made initial contact with all three: two with plans to follow up on the phone. The third I talked to this morning. I was initially really intimated by this one as the Kennel is one of the older ones in America, but it turned out great! Almost too easy in a way. They have a litter on the ground and have three girls who are still available. They are going to send pictures on Monday with the promise of a follow up conversation. I don’t know enough about their dogs yet, and as pick up would be about three weeks away I worry that the breeder wont know my family well enough by then. It might be difficult to judge if one of these girls would good for us, and I would hate to think we were a “last resort” couple for the litter. Then again, this breeder has been doing it for sooo long.. maybe they just KNOW. Your guess is as good as mine.

This process is still such a mystery. Sometimes I just want to shake my head an wonder how I got wrapped up in all this.

I’m a sad little puppy today. I got an email from the breeder letting me know there wasn’t going to be a puppy for us from the current breeding. There were a lot of show homes in the bunch and understandably, breeders want to place their puppies in homes where their dogs are going to get exposure and the kennel’s name gets out there.

I completely understand, but it doesn’t take away from my disappointment. We had really gotten excited by the idea we might be getting a puppy in July. This was going to be the last breeding this year for this particular kennel so I have a choice now: Do I wait until the next opportunity with this particular breeder? (Who I genuinely like but he/she may or may not be breeding for quite awhile) or do I start over and try to forge a new relationship and get on another wait list?

I’m not sure what the best thing to do is. All I do know is there will be no pitter patter of little paws this July and who knows when the stork will come. Sadness…