29 September 2017

Another day, another load of Finlay experiences....Finlay is 16 weeks old today!

It was my day off today and Deb was at work in the morning, so some home alone time with me and the boy. We had decided it was time to take him to the "dog park" near us. It isn't really a dog park, however it is the next best thing. It is a well frequented park by the local dog owners, and it is a really nice place to be....if you like dogs. It is fully enclosed so a lot of people let their dogs off, and everyone is really responsible.

It didn't take Finlay long to meet his first dog, which was a Min-Pin. He naturally said a big hello, which was a bit too much for the Min who slightly growled which Finlay totally ignored. So we moved on. Then we met a Pug, much more his kind of thing, the owner was a bit worried the Pug would be too much for Fin, but no such worries. The Pug was really boisterous and only around 9 months old, his breathing was so loud! Fin took that one in his stride. From there on in, dogs everywhere. There was one occasion where he did jump up at a dog who did quite seriously tell him off - just dog communication, not nastiness. Fin laid down and rolled over and apologised, totally appropriate and in that instance did take heed, which was good. Finlay even had a go on the skate ramp, he didn't get any 'air'. He finished that walk tired out, which was good as he slept the rest of the morning allowing me to get some bits done.

In the afternoon it was much of the same. He met a collie x spaniel mix that was fairly large and ever so tolerant. Fin gave him everything he had, in play terms, and had a whale of a time. He then met Jasper the Cocker Spaniel who lives near us, and actually got Jasper to play with him. Although Jasper is only 6 years old he generally doesn't play, but Finlay worked his magic. This time Fin was not so tired out despite his gallivanting, but he finally crashed about 8pm.

Finlay enjoying the skate ramp....he was actually quite annoyed he couldn't make it up the ramp, he sat at the bottom play-bowing at it and woofing.

Finlay being obedient. As I said in a previous blog, when he comes to the edge of a road you just say "wait" and Finlay parks his bum and waits for "over". He is such a star!!

27 September 2017

Deb does dog walking for the Cinnamon Trust charity, and twice a week takes out a Border Terrier called Dream and two Shih-Tzu's called Bubbles and Suki. Indeed at the moment Finlay is a pretty full on puppy with other dogs, he wants to say hello and jump all over them. The Cinnamon Trust dogs are a bit feisty with other dogs, but we thought it would be a good idea for Finlay to meet them and go out for a walk together. Today we went for a walk with Dream.

In fact, it was very straight forward. Finlay of course wanted to jump all over Dream who ducked and dived and stood her ground, but after a short period Finlay calmed down and they walked together like they'd known each other for years. It is really good practice for Finlay to be able to interact with dogs like this, and be told in no uncertain terms by other dogs when he is being too full on. Dream is around 7 years old and did give Finlay a bit of leeway due to him being a puppy, but was fine with him. We only walk a short way with Dream before I cut off and make our way home. Although Finlay would happily walk 5 miles a day, he is too young to be marching off too far. So he is carried part way home to protect his growing bones.....much to his disgust!

Finlay loves going out for his walks, we've seen TV programmes where dogs refuse to walk, but no such problems with our pup. He just zooms off. He is getting to the point now where sniffs are becoming interesting, he stops at lamp-posts and he knows he should be doing something, he just hasn't figured out what yet!

In case you haven't ever come across a puppy at the peak of his 'puppiness', have a look at this video. We have seen this numerous times with Finlay, his excess energy has to come out somewhere, this was him at lunchtime burning off some adrenaline. 

26 September 2017

Deb was on her own with the puppy today, as I was at work. It was also a day to test Finlay's capability to be left on his own, because Deb's car needed a service. So having walked him, he was then left on his own for the longest time yet. He was absolutely fine. It is of course vital that a puppy is comfortable enough in his surroundings to be able to be left on his own, we have never left our dogs longer than 4 hours or so on their own, but equally you can't be with them all the time, or they be with you all the time.

He was a bit manic when Deb returned, because he has so much energy right now, but he was dry and went straight out into the garden.

Another good walk in the afternoon and Finlay was on fine form. Today was another 'dry' day where Finlay didn't wee in the house, which is excellent. Over the last 5 days or so we have had more dry days than not, so I think progress is finally being made. In the evening, when he is at his most dangerous/lazy (depending on your point of view) he made a couple of clear indications that he wanted to go into the garden, and he did so. He has started pooing on the patio though, it seems like a bit of "I'll not be getting my paws wet on the grass tonight, so here will have to do".....

He did however have an episode of defiant "attack daddy", where no amount of "no" was cutting it. He tries it on more with me than Deb, so clearly I need to be firmer. He has worked out already who is the leader of the pack, and he doesn't mess with her! (and nor do I.....)

Here's a picture from the care home when we visited dad on Saturday. Being a bit naughty with his eye on a (plain) digestive biscuit, who could resist!

25 September 2017

It is sometimes impossible to know what drives a puppy, because he can't speak to you. After a fairly straightforward morning, Finlay suddenly explodes with energy and biting over lunchtime. Playtime is too rough and he is wanting to stick his teeth into everything, so presumably because he is teething it is driving him nuts. In the end despite redirecting his anger towards various toys and away from our hands and arms, he gets shut in the puppy play-pen to calm down. He has a big strop and tosses his beds all over the place and after 10 minutes we let him out again. He is calmer but trouble is there just under the surface.

I’m thinking that a longer walk will be in order this afternoon!!

24 September 2017

Today was Finlays first visit to Whiteley Lakes, which is a nice area in the middle of a business park, always quiet at a weekend. It is also a good chance to see lots of ducks and swans to see what Finlay makes of them. Well he loved the area and seemed to want to jump in the lake, which we didn’t let him do, there will be other times to let him try water but this isn’t the place….the lakes are quite deep right from the edge, so poor Finlay wouldn’t have got a taster he would have been full blown swimming, so didn’t want to chance that! He wasn’t too interested in the ducks because they were just serenely gliding around the lake, but he did take notice of the swans. Apart from being much bigger than him, they hissed at him, which intrigued him. We know from previous experience our other two just wanted to see the swans and say hello, or course the swans had other ideas….so caution was taken! We will come back here again because we know our previous dogs liked it here, plus Finlay loves both leaves and feathers, so plenty of those in abundance.

Finlay finds a quince from our tree....he's not sure what to do with it....

23 September 2017

Another puppy romp today, pretty much the same again, Finlay loved it and got tired out. The theory is with these romps is you go from having the dog off lead and under control and say “go play” and they get their socialisation. Then you call them, they come back, and you have a bit of control time again and go around the cycle again. However, Finlay isn’t so good at the recall, fun is just too much fun and he loses his sense of hearing. No amount of chicken or liver treats will get him back. We do get there eventually, but the boy is just having the time of his life. It is good for him, but in a way a bit of an unnatural experience, because you wouldn’t be out on a walk and come across a field full of 30+ puppies.

We also visited dad again, this time we took dad down to the café in the care home and had a coffee and biscuits…..’someone’ might have had a bit of biscuit also! Again Finlay loved it, and because he was still a bit tired from his romp, he sat quietly in dads arms whist he stroked him. It was lovely to see, and probably the first time I’ve seen Finlay relaxed in that scenario.

Finally we decided to bath Finlay, it needed doing because he was a bit smelly from his puppy romp, rolling around in a wet muddy field. But besides that, he is going to have many baths in his lifetime, so it made sense to get one in early to acclimatise him and it gave us the chance to give him a nice gentle one to not freak him out.

Did he enjoy the experience, well no, but he stood stoically through most of it. We didn’t do his head and neck nor was the bath very deep, but it did the trick. One of our previous Tibbies cried and shook most times we bathed him, but not Finlay. He went absolutely mad when we took him out of the bath though, rolling around and charging around the bathroom. He also hated the hairdryer with a passion, so Deb took on the hair-drying task whilst I brushed him, he loves to chew the brush so this was a good distraction. He then forgot about the hairdryer and by the end of the session was fine. I expect this will reset somewhat when we next do him, but hopefully this bath hasn’t put him off.

22 September 2017

Finlay is 15 weeks old today.

Today as well as a walk/carry around his local area we took our first visit to Whiteley shopping centre. This is a nice local area which allows dogs, lots of new sights and sounds for the puppy and lots of adoring people to make a fuss of him. Always plenty of those to be found, he has this way of looking at people and getting their attention, as soon as he knows they are looking he wags and that is it, they’re hooked. We stopped for a coffee in Café Nero and he found the perfect place on the corner to lay and pose, so as people passed….the look…the wag….the fuss….many times.

21 September 2017

Today, Finlay went to the woods, Kitescroft woods. He loved it here, loads of his favourite thing in all the world, leaves. He loves to chase leaves, so he was in heaven. Lots of new sniffs here too, it is very ‘peaty’ underfoot, so must have smelt glorious to his nose. He had a great time.

20 September 2017

Todays experience, visiting my dad in his care home. Luckily the care home my dad is in positively encourage dogs to visit, so it was Finlays turn today. Dad was in bed, so we’d taken a puppy blanket with us so he could go on the bed with dad. Finlay was a bit over excited but handled it well, he got mega amounts of fuss from all the staff as well as dad, who really loved seeing him. It was pretty heart-warming stuff actually. We will bring Finlay here often so it was important that he performed well, which he mainly did…..just puppy exuberance. 

19 September 2017

After the busy day yesterday, we decided to take him out on a couple of local walks. Old hat to us, but exciting for a Finlay getting to know his patch. We noticed the weirdest thing though.

We taught Finlay to “wait” before he is given his food, you say “wait” and he lays down, you put the food down and then say “go on then”. Works very well and he barely needed any training to do this. So imagine our surprise when we start walking him and reach the edge of the pavement to cross the road. “Wait” we say and on pretty much the first attempt, he sits and looks at us…..we then say “over” and he crosses the road. Our jaws nearly hit the floor. We have not trained him to do this, and yet since the first day walking and every day since, he is pretty flawless with this behaviour. But how, we haven’t trained him to do it and I’m pretty sure Aileen didn’t. 

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t trust him with traffic one bit. We’ve owned Tibbies long enough to know that obedience of this kind is one thing, but when a Tibbie suddenly wants to cross the road, they are going to do it, so the proper diligence is necessary requiring tight lead control. In Finlays case it is leaves blowing down the road, he’d chase them first and not think of the consequences, of course he would. But these initial good manners whilst out on lead were amazing to see. As for walking with a harness and lead, no bother. He just accepted them straight away, he’s not so keen on the lead when you’re preventing him from walking in the direction you want to go, it just means we are going in the wrong direction and Finlay is correct!

18 September 2017

Final inoculations day arrives!! We are on holiday all this week, we didn’t plan it this way, but it means he can have his jabs and then we can spend the week giving him all sorts of experiences. I didn’t go with him when he had his last jabs, but I did this time. Again for Finlay it is something to take in his stride, he goes into the vets quite willingly (I appreciate this may change over time and experience) makes a big fuss of the receptionist and the vet. The vet does the jab, which he pretty much ignores and has a kennel cough spray up the nose. Job done.

To celebrate his ‘freedom’ we take him to the beach in the afternoon at Titchfield Haven. This was the first time we see Finlay slightly on the back foot….I mean paw. He loved walking along the beach getting all the new smells, the tide was a long way out so we got to walk on a nice sandy bit. There was a large shallow pool of seawater left where the tide had gone, so Finlay quite readily wades in….we’re thinking this is a first (neither of our previous 2 Tibbies were that keen on water). But as he waded in, he suddenly seemed to realise “oh, this is wet”. And started randomly lifting his paws out of the water, at which point he quickly made it to dry land….well sand. Then of course the sand stuck to his wet paws, calamity!! So we picked up an unhappy Finlay and put him on the concrete walkway and he was happier with that. 

We then took him for his first cup of coffee/tea at a café, the Titchfield Haven café. He sat in the garden with us and was quite relaxed and happy his paws were drying nicely. Several people and staff came up and admired him, so that made his day. Needless to say, he slept well this evening!

17 September 2017

Today is the final day we have to carry him around on his walks, because tomorrow is final inoculation day. On todays carry he watched a man jet-wash his car (as mentioned previously), he was fascinated although this did raise a few moofs – he really wanted to go over and see what was happening. 

16 September 2017

Another puppy romp day. After a pretty good start the previous week, this week he wasted no time in getting stuck in. He is probably one of the more full on puppies and there are probably 30+ pups in the fields at Scallywags. He doesn’t care about the size or shape of the pup he is playing with, everything is fair game. We learned something about him too. 

He was playing with a fairly large sighthound, whippet or similar. Clearly he wasn’t going to outrun this pup, so he was playing and getting fairly comprehensively beaten in the wrestling stakes. So he went off to the side of the field and laid down. We had tried to call him, which he ignored. One of the Scallywag trainers said this was “calming behaviour” and we should not call him at this point. He said what Finlay was doing was recognising he could not outrun or outfight this dog, so had taken it down a notch. The Whippet totally understood, and they had a quiet interaction until Finlay was ready for another round…..they chased each other and after a while off to the edge of the field Finlay went, calming again. Worked a treat. Although this was only his 2nd socialisation event, he is already showing that he is very clever in his interaction with other dogs. Don’t get me wrong, he is as I said full on so can overdo it at times, trying to mount dogs for instance, but he gets appropriately told off and that is all part of the learning. Scallywags group their pups by confidence level rather than physical size, so Finlay gets promoted up a couple of groups, you see quite a few shy pups and pups not so keen to get stuck in, Finlay is not that pup…..so he gets to play with the big boys.

Random picture from the Finlay library as still no pics of a romp day. This is Finlay taking his angst out on daddys finger.

15 September 2017

Finlay is 14 weeks old.

We thought today we might try to get a good standing picture of Finlay to show off to his breeders, as they had posted some pictures on Facebook. However this proved to be not as easy as we thought (just as the breeders has said!). He can do ‘stand’ without issue, in fact his best stands and poses are when he does them on his own and when there isn’t a camera around. But as soon as you point a camera at him (well pretty much any animal) they start misbehaving. After many shots we got a few ‘ok’ ones but nothing that good. In the end the best one was a couple of days later when Finlay was standing watching someone jet-wash their car which he found fascinating and produced a great stand which I managed to capture on film.

Finlay is very verbal at times. He does woof at things but isn’t a noisy dog, but he does also like a good roll and this can quite often be accompanied by a lot of verbals. It isn’t something we set off, he suddenly decides to roll on the floor with some vigour and grumbles and sometimes woofs away. He can also do it in his bed, having great fun thrashing around, his woofs often muffled because he is woofing into the side of the bed. Hilarious to watch, he seems to be having great fun.

14 September 2017

We’re noticing that he still isn’t loving the car. We’ve done loads of short journeys to get him used to the car and we are getting there. Lots of whining and scraping, but he isn’t car-sick. As time progresses he seems to understand that nothing bad is happening, so slow progress is made. Strange really, he did a 3 hour car journey without issue on the day we picked him up. And yet short car journeys wind him up. I think it is a transient thing and he’ll get over it.

This was a picture of him on the way home from Crewe in the car, with another fave toy, the funky chicken from Perth.

13 September 2017

My turn to brush the dog today. Deb is better at brushing dogs and besides, she really enjoys it. When we last had dogs I was working full time and to be honest Deb did most of this kind of thing. However now I am part time too, I can get in on the dog maintenance action! So I gave Finlay a good brushing today, he seems to quite enjoy it although he is still pretty wriggly and enjoys chewing the brush, me….pretty much everything. But it is very satisfying brushing him, he comes up lovely and although he mainly has just puppy-fluff at the moment, he looks much better. 

As with all things, Finlay is un-fazed by the experience, certainly doesn’t dislike it…..he just hasn’t got the patience yet to sit/lay still for very long. Understandable for a young pup. Deb has also managed to clip all his claws, although again wriggling puppy doesn’t help, he didn’t mind the experience. Probably unless it hurts, he’s fine with it. Certainly his claws needed clipping, because he hasn’t been able to be pavement walked yet, he isn’t wearing his claws down, so they are like little needles and although he doesn’t mean to, when he rakes you with them playing….they can gouge a bit!

11 September 2017

This is one full on puppy. When we get up on the morning, Finlay goes out to do his business, demands his breakfast and then it is go-go-go. He starts playing with his toys and bullying you into playing too. He is certainly more hardcore with his dad than his mum, he already seems to be learning that mum is the alpha female around here so obeys her commands and tellings-off straight away. But he has also realised that dad is a way down the pecking order and can therefore take more liberties…..I’m trying to resolve that, but he is more of a devil with me unless I am very firm. I love it how clever they are and can work that out, daft dogs certainly are not!

He has a bad habit of chewing my slippers, whether I’m in them or not, or playing tug of war with my jeans or being a bit rough with biting. I make all the right squealing noises so he realised it hurts, and it REALLY does hurt sometimes, so he has to learn bite inhibition. He is improving without a doubt, but continued training in this area is necessary, and he can learn because he is a very clever dog that’s for sure.

Try not to laugh as this 3.5kg puppy tries to take down a full grown man.....

10 September 2017

Again not a lot to report. Finlay is still teething badly and wants to chew everything, so much attacking the Pizzle stick today.

When I say attacking the Pizzle stick......I mean attacking. Terrifying to watch.....

9 September 2017

Puppy Romp!! There is a local dog training school called Scallywags who run both training classes for puppies and socialisation for puppies called “puppy romps”. The romp is primarily to get puppies meeting other puppies, but there is an element of training in there too. I’ll be honest I’m not keen on dog training, but I’ve been before and you always learn stuff so I wasn’t sure what to expect of a ‘romp’. 

Essentially there are several fenced off fields and they group the dogs by confidence level rather than size. We didn’t know how confident Finlay would be, but we needn’t have worried. He immediately started playing and running around. There were a few minutes mid-way when he got flattened by some cocker spaniels and he went off to the edge of the area and hid for a bit. But he got his mojo back and got back into it, deciding it was time to mount every dog he met. He finished the session on a high, you could say! He loved every minute of it.

No actual photos of the romp.....so here is Finlay sticking his tongue out for you!

8 September 2017

Finlay is 13 weeks old today, 3 months old!

We decide to try him with a carrot as a toy, he dances around with it and takes it into the garden, he chews it happily and even eats some of it, to be fair our previous Tibbies both ate carrot. This entertains Finlay for a good while.

6 September 2017

As it won’t be too long before he is going to his first “puppy romp” we try his new puppy walking harness on for size. It fits perfectly and we were afraid that Finlay would dislike it, in fact he was like “what puppy harness”. He wore it for several hours during the day and was clearly no stress to him. We used the harness and lead to walk him around the garden and he couldn’t care less about it, what a star.

Here he is wearing his harness and playing with his "gonk" which he brought with him all the way from Perth. It is one of his favourite toys, along with "cow".

5 September 2017

Nothing much to report. House training still not perfect, still chewing for England.

4 September 2017

Finlay finds the stairs….well of course they have always been there, but he hasn’t had the will to go up them. But he just decided today was the day and he went straight up the 13 stairs without hesitation, luckily we heard him go up and rushed up to stop him coming down on his own. No worries on that front because of course Finlay was exploring the new rooms in his house. Time for another stairgate, that makes 3….just for one puppy!

Shoes, he does love a good shoe…..well any shoe will do!

Here he is, at the top of the stairs looking very pleased with himself.

3 September 2017

His character is really starting to come through, he is officially “joker puppy”. He had a tantrum in the kitchen with his round bed and flipped it upside down and then got under it. He was woofing in enjoyment at his achievement and all this in the middle of dinner preparations. We played with him for 20 minutes as he dared us to put our hands into his newly made den, so instead we put toys by the entrance and his big smiley face (and teeth) came out to meet us as we played tug. 

It becomes clear he is in love with his “pizzle” stick. We bought it to help with his chewing and teething, which indeed it does seem to. But he now expects it at every opportunity.

2 September 2017

Still eating well and enjoying his experiences. He has taken full ownership of his garden and is woofing at things he hears and sees. Pigeons must be woofed at, although they are clever enough to only land in the area which Finlay can't (yet) get to. Dogs in nearby gardens woofing, then Finlay has to join in, it’s only fair really. He does woof and yelp when he meets dogs when out for his carry, this however is just frustration because he wants to say hello, not anger or nastiness.

1 September 2017

Finlay is now 12 weeks old.

We have been carrying Finlay around our neighbourhood because of course we can’t walk him until his 2nd lot of inoculations. He loves the sights and smells. We have also taken him to our local shopping centre just to give him a variety of places to see and to make sure nothing phases him. It is safe to say that NOTHING phases him. He loves meeting people and they love meeting him, never before have we received so much attention…..well not since the last Tibbie puppy…..But everything he comes across he just takes in his stride, pushchairs, wheelchairs, humans in all shapes and sizes….he loves kids.

31 August 2017

We have our first episode of FRAPing, Frenetic Random Activity Period (or the puppy Zoomies). For no obvious reason Finlay decided to do super-fast laps of the garden to burn off some energy. Our other Tibbies used to do this too, so it wasn’t a surprise, but watching Finlay doing it is hilarious. He seems to have fun too.

We start to spot that Finlay can be incredibly obedient…..not always obviously! He will lay down and wait when you put his food down, ask him to wait and show him your hand, then say “go on then” and he gets stuck in. With a treat under his nose he can easily do sit, down and stand! And he isn’t even 12 weeks old yet….

House training….hmm, work in progress. In terms of pooing, this is ALWAYS done outside, however weeing he hasn’t got right yet. He sometimes gives only the slightest of indication that he might want to go outside or no indication at all. Sure we do all the right things, put him out first thing and after every meal. But he can be outside, be put on the grass numerous times and be told to “hurry up” then come in and wee on the puppy pad, or the lounge carpet! We’ve subsequently got much stricter with him and put him on the lead in the garden and this stops him from running to the back door. After several abortive attempts which can take 15 minutes he’ll give up and wee, naughty boy! The other night he’d been chewing a Pizzle stick for a while, stood up and looked right at us and just wee’d on the lounge carpet….it was like he was too lazy to bother asking to go out. But we are getting there…..

30 August 2017

Tonight, he slept all night again and was dry….in fact every night since we’ve had him other than that first night, have been the same.

The boy is settling in. It is obvious by now that he is teething and wants to chew anything, including daddy! He loves a tug of war with my jeans trouser leg, so this requires firm redirection onto his chew toys. He brought a funky chicken toy and a furry ‘gonk’ both of which he loves playing with. But not as much as my trouser legs and slippers…..hmmm.

He also discovered our patio door, that goes from the lounge to the patio. We never use it and the patio door hasn’t been open in a couple of years. However Finlay immediately recognises it as a “way in” and scrapes at the door to get in from the patio. It doesn’t work, but he keeps trying.

It is also clear he is a feisty puppy, the fence we erected is in two halves, a metal ‘chicken wire’ and wooden post section and a plastic fence with metal spikes for support. Having patrolled up and down it for a couple of days, Finlay picks the weak spot….the plastic fence and manages to tug it loose and get under it. No problem it is only into the rest of the our own garden. We wrongly assumed we could get away without ground spikes to fasten the bottom of the fence down, after all he is only 11 weeks old, how clever will he be. Well that taught us, bottom now securely fastened and he hasn’t escaped since.

29 August 2017

On his first night in our house Finlay slept all night without crying, he did wee on the puppy pad though. We decided to put Finlay in the kitchen in the puppy pen with his dog bed and a quilt along with a couple of toys and a night light. This seemed to work well.

We had fenced off part of our garden in order to keep Finlay contained in a part of the garden that was easy to manage. We know from experience that Tibbies like to explore and we didn’t want to lose Finlay in the depths of a flower bed at 11pm not knowing what he is up to. However, there is one flower bed in the area he is allowed, and it turns out he loves to rip leaves and flower heads off plants, which is fine except we don’t want him to poison himself. So extra fencing is required to keep him off these plants! The same is the case for the plants on the patio, so re-positioning and barriers are necessary!

Food, he loves it! He came down from Scotland with some cooked chicken, which he has along with some puppy wet food mixed with Royal Canin puppy kibble. It all disappears pretty swiftly. He doesn’t want to drink our water though, so we supplement it with watered down puppy milk and watered down straight goats milk (kinda the same thing).

He has his first brush. He was very good and loved the fuss, although keen to eat the brush!

28 August 2017

After the arrangements were finally made, Aileen kindly agreed to meet us ‘halfway’ rather than us drive all the way back up to Perth to collect Finlay. August bank holiday Monday was the day we decided on, we drove up to Crewe Railway Station and brought him home. 

He travelled down with Aileen by train from Edinburgh that day and by car from Perth to Edinburgh. He slept most of the way on the train and almost all the way in the car, without hardly a whine or squinny. He was a superstar, and our worries of a nightmare journey were unfounded, both in terms of a scared puppy and travelling on the last bank holiday of the summer holidays…..we must have been mad, but we got away with it.

As you can see Finlay was so stressed out by the whole affair, here he is scoffing his lunch in the back of my car. "Scoffing" and Finlay are to become a bit of a theme in his life!

28 July 2017

We saw Finlay, aged 7 weeks old. We travelled up to Perthshire, took a leisurely drive up to Scotland and stayed nearby on the Thursday night. Having travelled all that way, it was kind of inevitable that we would fall for at least one puppy, so Friday was a big day. We hadn’t had a Tibbie for over 2 years and the time was right for another. We found Aileen’s house easy enough and as soon as we drove up the driveway we knew we were at the right house, the sound of Tibbie woofing gave it away.

Sure enough once we went inside and met the litter of puppies we were smitten…..they mobbed us! There was one puppy that stood out, he came up and said hello whilst the others did too, they were as keen on playing with each other and running around the kitchen. But one came and said hello and had a cuddle and seemed to particularly react to my voice. The choice was made, but there were two pups that were very similar in look and we liked them both, but we went with our hearts. Aileen did say (not sure if she was serious or not….I suspect she was) “why not have two”. Tempting as that was, having two tiny terrors seemed like a big ask…..so we stuck with just the one. 

With the choice made, we did the tourist-ey thing and went over to Broughty Ferry and walked along a fantastic sandy beach and chatted about this massive decision we’d just made. The next day we travelled back down south and began preparing for the arrival of the cutest pup you’ve ever seen.

This was Finlay at 7 weeks old:

9 June 2017

Friday June 9 2017

Near Perth in Scotland, Finlay was born, 1 of a litter of 5 puppies. They are: (using the names I know them as now)
Finlay
Taggart
Ruben
Yoda
A girl pup – name unknown (Paris?)

The pups were born in the Balgay Tibetan Spaniel kennels of Aileen McDonald, mum is Baboshka, Balgay ‘Tym Tu Re Member’ and the father of the pups was Spencer, Jazpiper ‘First Addition’.