As I'm writing this I'm currently sitting on a 1h 50min delayed train to Pännäinen, Yay!!! Wilma is enjoying her stay in the animal section in the traincar. There is lots of different dogs to get acquainted with, a pug, a collie to name a few. The following pictures are taken last night when we made our last Christmas preparations. I'll let the pictures do the talking...
Waking up the day before Christmas I found my girls reading the paper.
A very cold morning walk
A refreshing cup of warm goodness and some Christmas pastries
I see you have some "nom noms" over there! Oooh! I could have one of those... please!
Is that my Christmas present?
They won't notice if one goes missing...
My Christmas present for you guys! Is me...
Also this event somehow managed to leak out to Youtube:
This year we decided to make a different Christmas card. Wilma's first staged photo shoot went really well. With a little help of some tasty treats she performed quite nicely. Not mentioning the grooming which took 2 hours...
We visited our home town, Jakobstad a couple of weeks ago and here are some pics of Wilma and her K9 friends.
Well here is Hugo a Irish red-coated setter. He is also 5 months old as Wilma, even though there are a size difference they love to play.
Baloo visited also and he is almost 1,5 years old. Hugo and Wilma were a little bit too excited for him, so he was more sniffing around the garden than playing.
This is the photographer's nightmare, three playing dogs. Andreas took about 50 photos of these three and these are the two that were not blurry.
*Piiiip* the cold weather here in Vaasa. Wilma was housetrained for almost one week and now due to the cold weather she has started to do her business inside again... *Piiiip*
We like the winter but right now it feels it could be warmer....
Wilma's like a clockwork, 06:30 +- 15 minutes she wakes up! This morning though was a bit different than the other somewhat 105 mornings she had had so far. There was something white fluffy and cold covering the pee and poop trails that used to be there. Carefully she put one paw in the snow, lifted it and back down again. After a quick taste and smell test of the snow, she rushed in to the deep snow. She went absolutely mental that girl. As the Youtube video tells, she was like a little child at Christmas. I did very quickly start to spot a small but quite hilarious, well maybe not for her but for me, small problem. Which later on became a vary large problem for me! You see in her baby fur the snow started to form larger and larger snow balls, weaving more and more hair into the balls. Snow is not that hot as you know, so she started quite quickly to shiver. As we came inside she didn't know what to do and with her puppy eyes she looked at me with grave despair, I could almost hear her scream "Do something about these awful cold thingies". So I swiftly came up with a cunning plan. I'll let the pictures do the talking!
"My Cunning Plan"
Later she sat down in the bucket, and boy did she enjoy the warm water. To prevent this from happening in the future, we have now bought a jacket and trousers for her.
I felt compelled to capture this event on video! And so I made a short Youtube video for you guys. Ooh and best of all it's available in HD! As I earlier mentioned it's captured in the morning, so I did my best to try and get it as bright as possible without distorting the video with noise. Also it helps when one does use a digital SLR. Enjoy...
Poodle grooming it was something.
We started one evening when Wilma was finished playing and started to get sleepy. Our first mission was to brush her before bathing time. It went quite well, we have almost every day brushed her so she is starting to get used to it. But bathing that requires more trickiness, because Wilma finds it more fun if you are in the shower with her than just her alone. Well lets just say you want to change clothes after washing her.
The hair dryer she is still a little sceptical to, it is too much noise! But if you hold her in your lap, she will hide her head between your body and left arm and then it just a go to dry her.
And then after a long, long, long .... time of fur drying you can start grooming her paws, tail and face. Let's just say the tail and paws where easy, she just laid down and you could start grooming them. Her face nevertheless was the real challenge! Andreas had to hold her paws still so she couldn't struggle and I had to held her head still so I wouldn't cut her nose or eyes. We got her neck and nose area clean, but for the eyes we had to leave it for next day.
And I'm happy to say that the next day when we groomed the rest of her face she was giving up with the struggling. She laid still and I put my fingers over her eyes so she wouldn't see the shaver. Now she is all groomed. We are trying to decide what kind of fur style we will cut to her. Since we are going on Wilma's first dog show in Vaasa next year :) so she will need to have a nice cut. Hopefully she will do good in the show.
We have already started training her and it is rewarding how fast she learns. She knows already how to sit, lay down, stand, wait, come, "ole hyvä" and "saa mennä". All the commands are in Finnish so it a little difficult to translate them to English. But of course she learns bad habits fast also...
Wilma has already some playmates; Fanny, 5-month old King Charles spaniel, Mindy, a mix between two small dogs, not quite sure which breeds. Nando, 9-year old fox terrier. Hopefully she will gain a new friend soon because my mom is getting a 4-month old Red Irish Setter named Hugo. I will take both Hugo and Wilma to the dog shows and also my friend Yvonne has a Cavalier Kings Charles spaniel named Baloo, he will probably come too.
During the night between Thursday and Friday it snowed in Vaasa. So the winter is arriving and Wilma is a little suspicious about the white stuff on the ground, but ones she figured out itt s edible (like everything else) she had a lot of fun :)
So in Vaasa everything is running a long and everyday we are happy that Wilma is with us. It is rewarding to have someone that lives in the moment like dogs do.
For the finish of this post if you want to listen to something funny check out the you tube video below. It is a Swedish radio program that tells about a day in the dog versus cats life.
Well, it has been a weekend full of happening in our home. Last Friday we went to Turku and took Wilma home with us. Her first car ride was interesting. I was prepared for some car sickness and her feeling left behind from her siblings. But it was nothing of sorts. Wilma was first skeptical about the car and a little afraid, though five minutes later she was lying down and started sleeping. And she slept the whole trip from Turku to Vaasa. I was astounded... And it was a long car ride, we started at 5 o'clock and arrived at home 11 PM.
Her first night went without trouble and she slept until 8 o'clock on Saturday. I thought that the transitions of homes seems easy for her. But the second night she started refusing to sleep in her own place, she wanted to sleep with us and that night there wasn't a lot of sleeping for either Andreas or me. Well now on the fifth night she sleeps through the whole night and doesn't put up any fight when we go to bed. So the good thing she is a fast learner! Which predicts good things for the future, because we will go to shows and also TOKO. Wilma's mother is very good at agility, so perhaps that is also something we will try with Wilma.
When we go out with Wilma in the park, she is always so excited. She brings us fallen tree leafs, I think she has learned that from her mother who has a toy mouse which she keeps fetching every time you throw it. Well Wilma has seen several dogs and birds in the park. The first dog she saw was a fox terrier, and she was so excited that she ran to greet the fox terrier and then came running back to us. The fox terrier, named Aldo was not so keen on playing with Wilma but she wanted to greet Wilma, who was standing behind us and looking skeptical and a little bit afraid. But after seeing it was nothing to be afraid of she went and greeted Aldo. We have noticed that the first time she sees some new dog she is a little bit afraid, but new people she charms her way. Well the good thing is that where we live there are a lot of dogs, so she will get used to the.
Oooh, Wilma also saw another puppy, it was a dachshund, and he was only 9 weeks old. I didn't catch the name of the puppy but the good thing is that they are one of our neighbours, so there Wilma found a new play mate.
Andreas has also put up some videos of Wilma's first car ride and first day in the park. You can check them out here to the right. We will also put up some pictures of Wilma, because she has charmed all of our neighbours, she is very cute.
This is a new blog for our puppy Wilma. She is one of the red dwarf poodles from the N-litter of Kennel Trucker's. We will be updating this blog with all the news there is about our new family member. Go check out Kennel Trucker's homepage!
