My renewed excitement in life is kindled by the birth experience as I lived it through my Champion Mom Lady. The babies were born two and a half weeks ago.
I will recall for you some snippets of moments of that experience. Breeding a girl like Lady takes the cooperation of not only nature but the wonderful people in the Leonberger community. We made some sort of verbal arrangement last summer. Then we waited and waited month-after-month for her to come into season.
Lady had her first litter of puppies in June of 2018. After giving birth, it seemed she would not go through the awful changes everyone told me she would experience — losing almost all of her coat, being skinny — but she did, in fact, go through stage. Gradually she emerged again in glory ready for a show again.
For this proud mama, she did well. No! She was magnificent! One of her puppies stayed with us, and Lady and Dara became close buddies. I believe Lady truly forgot that she ever had puppies. She lives in the moment. Unlike the human trait of analyzing and thinking about how things happened, it seems intuitive that dogs are present for the moment only. It’s not that they do not know things, they just don’t seem to think like we do.
I’m getting off track!
My husband says, each time a kid left, we got another dog. We generally favored the female sex, and it has taken me nearly thirty years to be able to call them bitches.