Best Laid Plans…

Writing helps me decompress… when I get the chance to write, that is.  I should probably do it more often and decompress a bit more but, ah well, such is life.  We do what we have to do to.  Today I kicked the kids and the puppies outside to make time for writing.  It’s a beautiful day.  The boys are tossing the football.  Apparently one of them is not a very good catcher because it keeps hitting the side of the house.  I’m sitting in the sun on the couch with a box of Kleenex and my second cup of coffee.  I never have a second cup of coffee but my first cup is all over the inside of Tim’s car.  What a day it has been. 

I have been fighting sickness all week.  And if there is any week that it is tough to be sick, it is week 7 of puppies.  Temperament testing is a timely thing - no earlier than 7 weeks EVER, and after that 7 week mark everyone is chomping at the bit to pick their puppy!!!  So getting it completed and the information out to everyone ASAP is best practice.  So getting sick that week is no good.  The woman I had asked to do it was not interested in stomach bugs and colds right before visiting her family… and who could blame her?  I would have sent myself packing.  And I honestly wasn’t up for it anyway.  Once the stomach bug passed, I begged my second option to test for me.  Christy Lynn, Hamish’s owner, wasn’t too concerned as her kids were sniffling too, so I packed up our snotty-nosed lot of kids, crates, fences, tripod, puppies and other paraphernalia into my 15 passenger van and headed to Ivy Creek Farm for the day.  Thankfully God shone his kindness on me and I felt pretty good during testing and we knocked it out in no time flat.  

If you don’t know anything about temperament testing you can catch yourself up on how we do it on this post from our last litter.   

I was happy to use Christy-Lynn again this time around, Hamish’s mama. She is an efficient tester and she didn’t mind that I was miserably sick with a cold.  I had already pushed the date back because of sickness earlier in the week and we really needed to make it happen!  I also got to meet her new OTSC, Sora, from South Dakota.  I’ll be keeping my eyes on her over the next few years. She was sweet and beautiful with a wonderful temperament.  

Overall I was pleased with how the puppies did.  It was so interesting to see how different they were from Hamish’s puppies, and yet also a lot of similarities.  It will be fun to find homes for all these little pumpkins! However, the females’ tests were not at all what I was looking for.  I have been extremely torn about which one to choose to keep out of the two and I was hopeful that testing would give the Hallelujah moment I needed. Now, I am an extremely indecisive person when it comes to these kinds of choices.  And, inevitably, I will second guess my final decision over and over and over.  Many times regretting the decision I finally did make.  It’s a terrible curse that is genetic.  Generations of Cooke family members have legendary moments of deep regret and remorse over sometimes the most insignificant of decisions.  It’s probably some kind of mental health issue that deserves counseling but none of us have ever really tried to break the cycle of crazy.  We just keep seeing it pop up in our children and sigh, “That’s the Cooke curse, honey.  I have it too.” Pat them on the back and leave them to wallow in their crazy.  

The heart of the problem, really, is putting a tremendous amount of importance on a decision to which most people probably wouldn’t bat an eye.  They close their eyes, point their finger, and go along merrily with the choice without a thought to its possible repercussions.  Shrug their shoulders at negative outcomes even!  Instead of beating themselves up for months, even years, over the terrible, horrible, what-was-I-thinking-choice that they made.  I envy those people. 

I wish I was exaggerating but just ask my husband.  And the fact that I’ve spent two paragraphs on this singular issue says a lot about how I feel about decisions. Either that or it’s really just been far too long since I’ve decompressed.  Or maybe the coffee on Tim’s car ceiling is still bothering me.  Anyway, I digress.  

Based on what I’ve just told you, you now might understand that the weight of my decision was something like this.  THE FUTURE OF MY BREEDING PROGRAM WAS HANGING ON WHICH FEMALE I CHOSE. That’s it. For years I would be plagued by moronic dogs and complaining customers if I messed this up. I just spent an entire day during this insanely busy time driving Sadie to a family in Alabama (lovely family, she will have a wonderful life!!!) so I was already reeling from the disappointment of that unfortunate situation in choosing a Lucy successor.  So this decision felt even heavier.  

Anyway, all that to say I turned to an expert.  Helen Holbrook, Lucy’s breeder, is a wealth of year’s of experience in breeding and I respect her opinion immensely.  I made plans to take the two girls 3 hours south to SC for the day to have them evaluated by her.  Unfortunately, I didn’t make it any farther than Asheville and that’s where the coffee hit the ceiling. 

I had just merged west to head to SC when I was slammed from behind.  The back window shattered in on the puppies, my jaw hit the steering wheel, and my coffer exploded all over myself and the interior of the car.  I pulled over, thankful to hear puppies screaming, which meant they were at least alive and ran back to check on them.  All seemed well except for some very panicked pups, poor things!  The guy who hit me was already running up to the car to check on us and thus began the 3 hour ordeal that ended in me driving back home with the puppies in the van.  Thankfully it happened close by where my husband worked so he drove over to help manage the situation and make phone calls and all the other things you do in those situations so I could just sit off to the side and cuddle with the puppies (I realized that I was very thankful that I’ve always had either children or puppies to hover over in these situations bc it keeps my mind off of myself and my own panic.  God knows I’m a psycho who needs to have something to nurture 24/7).  

I had managed to squeeze the puppies out of the back of the car through a small crack in the door and I was fortunate enough to have my testing pens in the car too.   So I set up on the roadside with the puppies and just waited for everyone else to handle the rest.  Most of my answers to the questions they asked were “I don’t know” and it made me realize that I should probably have a better handle on who we have car insurance through and where we keep things like car registrations… those are the unimportant things in life I rarely fill up brain space with. I’m too busy obsessing over where my next dog is coming from or what my children are up to.  Either way, everyone seemed to figure it out eventually without my interference.  In fact, my rather odd appearance had most keeping their distance.  I understood better when one police officer came up to ask if I was ok and he told me he didn’t see the dogs in the pen initially and thought that I had simply set it up around myself as some kind of “safe space”. Insert hysterically laughing emoji here!!!  He then explained that he wouldn't have been surprised if that’s what it was based on what he usually finds on the streets of Asheville.  If you’ve ever been to Asheville for any length of time, you’ll know exactly what I mean.  There are some real special ones wandering around out here.  It was nice to know that I fit right in.  

However the staring onlookers interpreted me and my roadside pen, I was grateful that I was distracted by sweet puppies and not having to deal with the nonsense that is police, tow trucks, and insurance companies until it was time for the officer to block the on ramp and let me drive home.  I am making myself sound like a really unstable human.  

All in all, it was not a successful trip to SC.  I hope to reschedule. However, I may have learned a bit about the females by how they reacted in trauma. God tends to slip a lesson or two into these moments.  I’m sure there will be more.  Somehow we now have three totalled cars in our yard from 2025 alone to be towed away.  And none of them have had anything to do with the 16 year old who just got his license.  How??  But I am home with my pups, safe, showered the coffee out of my hair, my jaw is severely bruised but nothing worse, and it wasn’t my fault so at least my insurance premiums won’t be going up.  

Sheesh that was a long one.  I don’t know who reads this stuff, but if you do, thank you for humoring me as I decompress from a long and trying week.  I must have really needed it!

Top row left to right: Maple, Jack, Cinnamon

Bottom row: Harvest, Candy, Cider