ol & rach meet the pups!

little Luke sleeping on his siblings

so finally! we got to go see the 5 week old pups this past weekend! we had spent the Friday eve, Saturday and Sunday morning in Whistler celebrating our 5th wedding anniversary, we'd had a great time chilling out up there, our kind Voss family friends had let us stay in their cool place up there and it was nice to feel like we did something special. so then to top it off with a cherry on top it was cool to go and visit the pups for the first time on Sunday afternoon.

we were due to turn up at Avril's around 3pm and mooched home via a pumpkin muffin and americano misto at zephyr cafe in Squamish (our new favorite weekend haunt). On arrival home we unpacked a few things and put on clean clothes and old shoes (as instructed by Avril). We were making good time, we didn't want to be late for this important event and appear irresponsible! I had the directions all ready as I'd prepared well and checked out gmaps before leaving Whistler... or so i thought! When I successfully directed us to 164th St we soon realized we were on the wrong 164th Street and this did not look anything like the place we originally visited! After frantically pulling the map out and having to call Avril we rolled up about 40mins late.. anyway that's just life - Ol says i learnt a lesson by not actually typing the house # into gmaps, my excuse is that i'm still getting used to this numbered streets malarkey, windy streets with real names are much simpler! ;)

to the important info! we were greeted by Avril and some of the older dogs, she lead us to the bleach dip for our shoes and sanitizer for our hands then through the house to the pup run/pen outside, and they were... 11 bundles of cuteness! They were all snuggled up together and snoozing, one of Avril's friends from Washington was also there visiting and she promptly handed me a pup which just as promptly snuggled up on my lap.. wow! i was a bit worried at first that i might hurt them or something but soon saw how Avril handled them and she encouraged us to pick any of them up we wanted so we just started waking them all up. They sporadically got a bunch of energy and started playing and exploring around then moments later they'd be passed out sleeping again! They grow so much right now that they sleep a lot, their eyes are now open but they still can't see or hear 100%.

Avril told us that the pup's Mum, Beau has now had just about enough of them attacking her for feeding and doesn't spend much time around the demanding little blighters any more - she said they get a feed from her twice a day now and Beau isn't too keen on even this! I don't blame her to be honest - ouch! The pups are now having 4 meals of raw food each day too which so far has been ground chicken/turkey, some herbs (including slippery elm), cod liver oil and egg (shells included), they also tried some yummy tripe the other day and get to chew on a chicken carcass everyday to get them started on eating bone - tasty! i've done quite a bit of reading on raw feeding and it's really interesting, strange as it might sound i'm looking forward to feeding it (I must not be a squeemish soul!). So anyway, while we were there she dished some out for them, there were 3 bowls and we put the 3 smallest round one bowl and then 4 around each of the other 2 bowls, they 'wolfed' it down and then one by one became super charged with energy (and also poop!) they were so cute as they're just starting to play with each other now too.

Bandit the pup's dad came over to say hello and Avril said that he was very gentle around them, one of the biggest male pups (named Bruiser right now!) was jumping up at the fence to say hello so Avril took him out to Bandit - this was the cutest thing cos they were trying to play with each other, Bandit is quite young himself so he was so excited - adorable!

little Bruiser taking his dad Bandit on!

as there are 11 of them it's hard to tell them apart that well so we kept asking Avril every 5 mins which one is this? which one is that? we did get a good basis of an idea of which ones we are interested in though so now we need to make a decision over the next few weeks as to which pup we'd like.. this is not going to be easy. We have decided we like a black nosed dog for our first (as oppose to liver nosed) and initially we were thinking a male but i think now we'd probably go for a girl too. we have managed to narrowed it down to 3 male possibles and 3 girl possibles, some of these have show potential so Avril may be some of them - i guess when we know which ones she's going for we will know which are left. She said she'd probably know by 7 weeks and we're planning to go back in 2 weeks so we should get a better idea then.

in the meantime we can start purchasing our essential pup items! along with preparing/getting excited for my mom, sis and mike to come for their 4 week visit in Aug (yes they can help with the pup too!) and to our friends Si and Priscilla coming at the end of July AND also thinking about moving to Squamish.. exciting times indeed.

the 5 year anni shot up on Whistler peak