Waiting for Santa...

Every year, our town has a tree lighting ceremony followed by Santa arriving on a firetruck with sirens blaring. Loud noises and crowds are a great experience for our Seeing Eye puppies so I invited our puppy club to join in the holiday festivities because the tree lighting is less than three blocks from our home.
Although Harley is no longer a Seeing Eye puppy, he came along to the tree lighting. He did not like the sirens that came blaring along with Santa so he found a friendly lap to climb up on for some reassurance.

Since the tree lighting was so close to our home, I invited the puppy club over for a potluck dessert. One of our puppy club members said I was "gracious" for having everyone (and dogs!) over. I asked if "gracious" was the same as "nuts" because that's what my husband said I was.

There were 7 club dogs plus Harley making for a nice "pack of dogs" in our home. It was fun! All the puppies were very well behaved. No food was stolen and amazingly not a single accident either -- excellent considering most of the dogs were less than 12 months old. Of course, all the people enjoyed the desserts too!

That weekend, we heard sirens blaring meaning that Santa was making his rounds through the neighborhood. We had never heard of this tradition until we moved here -- every year Santa comes around behind a blaring firetruck. I think he stops to give candy to children but alas, nothing for the dogs :-(. I took Quail outside and we waited patiently for Santa to come driving by.

Harley and Quail's presents are all wrapped and waiting for Christmas morning! Merry Christmas!

An Invitation to see Ava

Mixed in with Christmas cards was a letter from The Seeing Eye inviting us to come see Ava at her Town Walk. This is what I call her graduation and this will probably be the last time we get to see our little pup. Ava is the fourth Seeing Eye puppy we've raised and it looks like she may become our fourth dog guide too.

Ava returned to The Seeing Eye at the end of August and she entered into training shortly after passing her medical tests. After we see her at her Town Walk, she will hopefully be matched with a blind person pretty quickly. She'll train with her person for a few weeks before going to her new home and new job as an official Seeing Eye Dog.

It's bittersweet to raise these puppies. We want them to succeed yet we wouldn't be so disappointed if they came back to us either. I'll really miss Ava -- she was very affectionate and a real sweetie. We raised her at a time in my life when I needed her just as much as she needed me. I'll miss her dearly.

Let's Make a Cake

I'll bake banana bread, cranberry bread, etc... but I'm not really one to bake a cake. Maybe because I'm really not a cake person unless it is a raspberry chocolate ganache cake from Wegman's -- yum yum!

But a cake out of diapers -- well, that's more my speed because now it is a craft thing. My youngest sister had the idea to make a diaper cake for my middle sister's baby shower. We looked up ideas online and in the end, kind of just did our own thing mostly because we didn't want to roll up diapers and use a ton of rubberbands. The base of the cake was rolls of toilet paper. And then we used lots and lots of diapers, baby toys, baby lotions, etc... Everything was held in place with ribbon, tape and office binder clips. We didn't want anything to be permanent.

I've been spending a lot of time knitting and knitting and knitting for my upcoming niece or nephew and all the little knit things came in handy as cake decorations. I was told by one of my friends that I had to make upcoming n/n a "woobie" which I found out was a little animal sewn onto the center of a tiny blanket that a toddler can drag around and drool on. So I searched for something and found a cute octopus to knit (patern Socktopus on ravelry.com). I attached the octopus to a little circle blanket and my little octopus woobie even had Finding Nemo blanket binding on it. It made for a very cute cake topper.

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Quail and Friends meet some horses...

It's great for our Seeing Eye pups to meet all sorts of critters. Since our puppy club is in a more suburban part of New Jersey, most of our club pups never get to meet horses so we arranged a club outing to visit the barn where Ed's sister keeps her horses.

None of our pups were afraid of the horses and vice versa -- the puppies were so curious and very well behaved around the horses.

We spent a lot of time talking about puppies and horses. Afterwards, we went out for lunch at Applebees -- and yes, our puppies went inside with us. Lunch for the people, nothing for the pups and they were very well behaved there too!


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If she can do it, then so can I !!!

We have baby gates up around the house so Quail doesn't have full run of the house -- she basically has the living room, kitchen and crop room (my workshop space). So it's a little disconcerting to walk around the 3 rooms and not see her anywhere -- why would I ever think to look on the back of the sofa? Well, Quail was resting very comfortably there -- I guess she thinks if Olivia is allowed up there then she is too. Of course Olivia is a lot lighter AND she's not going to be a Seeing Eye Cat.

A Belated Boo

It seems like once Halloween hit, I was swamped with my sister's baby shower stuff so I haven't been able to blog in awhile. I'm finally getting caught up...at least for now. Hopefully I won't be so swamped with Christmas stuff :-)

So of course we had to take our pups Trick or Treating, or rather, for a walk in costume. Harley went as a bad boy dog in his Harley Davidson denim jacket (of course) and a "bad dog" bandanna. We actually bought Harley this denim jacket back when we had him as a puppy so we're glad he came back to us so he could wear it again!

Quail went in her purple witch costume looking as cute as ever. And while we were out and about, we ran into George, the Great Dane cowboy.

Harley and Quail had a great Halloween. No candy but plenty of milk bones from Robyn at the travel agency :-)

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