I'm Home !!

Who would have thought anyone could be so happy to be returning to the land of chaos and never-ending, stick-in-your-clothes hair. Did I forget the occasional bursts of noise in that description?

I'm finally home and I can't believe how much I missed it. Apparently, it missed me too :)

Charles is the only one of Buffy & Dundee`s pups not to have moved to a new home yet. His will come. In the meantime, he`s mighty cute and doing well with his crate training. I forgot how sweet GSP pups are when I compare them to Gizmo, my sister`s pug pup (who sounds remarkably like Cartman on South Park for some reason). He and Dublin have become close friends. Here`s a few pictures of him I took last night.






Unfortunately, not everything I have come home to is wonderful. Chanel (Can ch Ersehnen By Design), Spirit (Can Ch Ersehnen Blythe Spirit) and Ziggy (Can Ch Robinhoods Ziggy Stardust) all turned fourteen towards the end of January. When I left for my surgery Spirit wasn`t doing well. Her back end had begun to fail and I suspected that by the time I was home again there would be some decisions to be made. There are times when I hate being right. Unfortunately neither Chanel nor Ziggy is doing well anymore either. I don`t know if I can cope with losing all three of them at once but I`m not sure it is fair to ask more of them. Chanel`s decline in particular has been very fast. When I left she was doing the best of the three and now I`m tempted to say she is doing the least well.

It`s hard to think of the house without the three of them. None of them were bred by us but I did make the trip down to the US with Ziggy`s breeder, Sherry Saunders, to bring her dam to the stud dog for breeding. Although Ziggy isn`t in any of our breeding pedigrees anymore, she has been a unique and special individual her whole life. There are very few, if any, dogs bred at Nuthatch that don`t have either Spirit, Chanel or Charlie (Mex FCI Latin Am Can Ch Nuthatch`s Presumed Innocent) in their pedigrees. Spirit and Chanel are littermates that arrived here separately and Charlie is their nephew (bred by us), out of their brother Andy (Am Can Ch Ersehnen The A Thing). I still count meeting Betty Jane Reece-Weaver (Ersehnen GSPs) as one of the luckiest things I`ve done in dogs. Between them Spirit and Chanel have produced some truly stellar brood bitches including Emily (Can Ch Nuthatch`s At Last, Charlie x Chanel), Jeannie (Nuthatch`s Simply Irresistible, Charlie x Chanel) and Bug (Can Ch Nuthatch`s Truly Madly Deeply, Charlie x Spirit).

I think this is going to be a hard week.