The Breeders Gathering.

What a fun day today was. At 8:30 a.m. Lacey (Velvet/Koby
girl) and her 1/2 sister 1/2 niece that she lives with came over for
the day. At 9:30 my sister went over and picked up Rosie and Buddi (Rosie's daughter). At 10:00 Mera came over. At 11:30 I ran over and picked up BrideGroom-Noodles.
Shortly after noon, Tucker (Rosie's son) and his guardian mom,
Jennifer, came over. A little after that the guardian mom, Ally,
came over with Chevy (Mera/DaVinci), Francie
(Rosie's daughter), and Chloe. It was a doodle dog party. Thank
goodness Jennifer and Ally stayed. What a dog party is was. There were big doods, little doods, black doods, and white doods
all at the dog party. They even wore name tags. For each of them I cut
out a white bandanna and wrote their names on it and put it on them.
So...Why, you may ask, did we have 10 visiting doods , Velvet and Kori,
and the four Duchess puppies at our house today? Some breeders came
over today. This was who was in attendance: Helene of Westwood Labradoodles in Ohio, Rochelle of Spring Creek Labradodles in Oregon, Bonnie of Heartsong Australian Labradoodles in Kentucky, Gretchen of Pacific Rim Labradoodles in Oregon, and Mindi of Colonial Village Labradoodles

in Indiana. Renee of Yesteryear Acres in
Ohio met us later. Bonnie was wearing white pants. What was she
thinking? I gave her a hard time and Mera , as if on cue, jumped up on
her and put a dirty paw print on her pants. Really I was just teasing
and felt kind of bad. It was great to have all the breeders there to
see and feel the various coat types and colors and see if we agree on
what they are. It is not always clear cut just what the coat
types/colors are. A coat that one breeder may call a red wool, another
breeder may refer to as apricot fleece. A wool coat is usually curly,
but not always. It can be soft or coarse, straight or curly. Fleece can
be straight, curly, or wavy. Also, the coats the puppies have are
generally not the coats they will end up with. We can't just look in a
book to determine what the coat is because it is the texture that
determines what it is. Experience is the key, and feeling/looking at
coats with other breeders was great. I've had about 14 litters and
about
110 puppies and am feeling pretty comfortable and confident about coat
types. Still it was great to hear what Rochelle had to say. She has
much more experience than I. I wasn't totally sure about a couple of my
girls' coats. (110 puppies!? why aren't I living high on the hog?).

Mindi, Gretchen, Rochelle, Bonnie, Helene, me (with Velvet)

After the others left, Helene and I stuck around to run some doggie pregnancy tests. She bred a dood
a few weeks ago and is wanting to know if she (the dood) is pregnant. She drew the
blood before leaving (of course) and kept it on ice all the way here. I
drew some blood from Rosie to do a test. I was so proud of myself. It
had been about a year since drawing blood or starting an IV. I got her
on
the first try, and didn't even use a tourniquet. O.k., so we have the
blood. Now what? We can't use the whole blood for the canine pregnancy
test. We have to separate the blood and use either serum or plasma.Hmmm
....last evening Helene and I emailed back and forth about ways to
separate it. I suggested she put the tube of blood in her pocket and go
to the merry-go-round and have someone spin her around really fast. She
said that was a good idea, but I noticed she didn't do it. This is what
she came up with:

Now
look at that picture and picture this in your mind: She took a latex
glove, put the tubes of blood in a finger, Duct taped the finger
closed, tied the glove shut, put a small doggie collar through the tied
part of the glove, then...now get this...I swear this is how breeders
amuse themselves and each other when they get together...started
swinging it around and around really fast to try to get the blood to
separate. I took a turn swinging it too. It was harder than it looks
and I couldn't do it with my left hand. After about five minutes we
took it out. It hadn't separated very well. Still, we were running late
for the dinner so we went ahead and did the test for her dog. We really
didn't have enough serum so we couldn't be sure the results were
accurate. We took Rosie's tube of blood with us in the hopes it would
separate on its own.

We dropped Rosie and Buddi off on the way to dinner in Zionsville. That is where Mindi
lives and she is one who arranged the dinner. She also arranged to have
a vet there who did a talk and question & answer session for
us. We ate dinner and had fun chatting. The restaurant started filling
up and I was feeling uncomfortable about how noisy we were and that I
was not dressed very nice (I forgot to change out of my jeans before
leaving) so started pushing for us to go elsewhere. We walked down the
street to this restaurant/bar place. As we were walking in Helene asked
me if I had ever gotten kicked out of anyplace. (I told her about the
time when I was in the Navy stationed on Adak, AK and I threw a drink in a Marine's
face - he was being ungentlemanly - and it was suggested I vacate the
premises before I got in trouble.) Anyway, there wasn't enough room at
the table for all the breeders so we started doing some rearranging of
the tables. The staff there didn't appreciate our efforts and said that
was a fire hazard and we couldn't do that. They said we would have to
sit at separate tables. That would be no fun. The others didn't come
from other parts of the country just so we could sit in the same
establishment but at different tables.Humf ! so we walked out and told
the others coming in that we just got kicked out. We went to a nice
little bar that didn't care about fire hazards. We scooted three tables
together and commenced to have a great time. Renee is very animated and
told us some funny, and not so funny, stories. Rochelle has the
chocolate girl puppy from Velvet's very last litter. We called that pup
Luckita, they named her Miracle Finale. Mira is her little boy's dog, aww that is so sweet and I'm so glad. Helene bought an ultra sound machine off eBay. I'm so jealous
Gretchen is really funny. We seem to have the same sense of humor.
Bonnie and I had met a couple times before. We met at Gen and Terry's
at Sierra Vista Labradoodles
about 2 1/2 years ago (I think). We also were at the breeders seminar in Chicago a couple of years ago. Mindi and her husband bought their house and property with the purpose of breeding Labradoodles in mind. They recently had their first litter. Pat, also from Zionsville,
sat at the other of the table at the restaurant and the bar. I didn't
get a chance to talk to her. There, now I talked about everybody who
was there. Oh, except for Darwin, Renee's husband. He cleans poo!

It was midnight before I got home.