Award Winning Cowboy

Congratulations to Trudy Bray and Cowboy who recently earned "Ears Up" and "Dynamic Duo" awards at the St. John Ambulance Therapy Dog awards dinner for their work with special needs kids.

Cowboy is a Drake son, bred by Grahamgolden in Elora. He, along with his people Nick and Trudy and his brother Barley, field train with us every week so we're very lucky to watch him learn and grow into being such a great representative of our breed.

Busy Week

Busy week here in the Tidewater household. We're having a visit from Leia and Reba while Wendy and Ron have a vacation someplace sunny. We also have Jamie visiting - she's breeding to Drake and the boys think that perhaps Bree will be in season any minute. So it's been exciting keeping boys and girls separate and keeping everyone exercised and happy. To top it off, it's been wet and muddy so keeping everything clean is a bit of a pain. February shouldn't be muddy!

Asher, Therapy Dog

On a much happier note, congratulations to Danielle Wilson and Asher (Tidewaters Fire Quacker JH, WC, CGC) for becoming a certified Therapy Dog! Therapy works has been Danielle's passion for a number of years and Asher is helping her keep doing what she loves. Great work guys!

Asher is from last year's Rowan and Leia litter and he's accomplished so much in his first year - he has his Working Certificate, Junior Hunter title, his Canine Good Citizen and some Rally Obedience legs as well.

Recent News

Can't believe it's been almost a month since I last posted. We've had a tough time around the Tidewater household in the past few weeks and we've been a bit distracted. As most of you know, I lost my Autumn dog earlier this year, and I've had a really tough time working through that. We also recently lost a litter of puppies. We bred Cassie to Drake in the fall, and anticipated her puppies the first week of February. About 10 days before her puppies were due, we heard from Helen that Cassie had started to give birth (the plan was that she would come to our house to do that). The survival rate for puppies who are born that early is virtually non-existant - so much development happens in the last 10 days. However we did have 3 viable puppies. We spent a few sleepless nights and a few visits to the vet and some tube feeding and a bunch of time getting puppies to nurse, but to no avail. We lost the whole litter of 5. So, there have been many tears and "what-ifs" and some very disappointed future puppy owners. The good news is that Cassie did very well through everything and is doing just fine. We've rearranged our breeding plans for this year and hopefully will be able to accomodate pretty much everyone who has been waiting, but it's heartwrenching to go through all that and we'll sure miss having babies around this winter.

Stud Dogs

People often ask us if it's difficult to have intact boys in the house all together. The theory being that they could constantly fight for "top dog" position, particularly since they're fairly active stud dogs and we often have bitches in season in for breeding (not to mention our own intact girls). This photo is a perfect example of how our boy dogs get along. They were hanging out in the hallway tugging on that stuffed toy before I came along and took their photo. It's pretty dark, but I think they're all saying "hey, mom, don't ruin our image"!

The Blooper Reel

Nope, I really can't sit here. Drake gets bored by the whole thing.

Big dogs only. Little dog has left the photo.

Mark enters the picture. Drake is still bored by the whole thing.

Run AWAY!

Merry Christmas 2011

So, photographing dogs is difficult at the best of times - they're active and anything you do to get their attention can be construed as an invitation to lick the lens. We were particularly challenged this year by a puppy who hasn't quite mastered the art of the sit-stay...particularly since she's been locked up for days because she managed to break a toe and we're supposed to keep her quiet (ha!). We ended up with lots of lovely pictures of the grown up dogs...but none other than a few with little Ms. Crispin in them. So, with the thought of making lemonade out of lemons...we added the caption and now it's a bit funny.