Babies can be a pain in the butt, but they are so cute, so sweet, and so funny that you fall in love with them anyway. The planning, the work, the lost sleep, and the expense are all worth it. When the idea of a breeding becomes the reality of rowdy furballs– it’s quite exciting. When the furballs turn into beautiful, loving adult collies –it is rewarding indeed.

Amber’s puppies are eight weeks old and going for their eye checks this week. Soon after that, I and the other three owners of Amber and her babies will decide which puppies are going where. At least a couple of Amber’s puppies will be available. I should know the specifics by March 1, 2020. It is a beautiful litter. I am happy we got to breed Amber to the handsome tri boy Jax ( Ch Milas Rigoletto of Tairis) Jax looks like he will be a great producer for his owner Alma Metz. The siblings Jax, Reven, and our own Poppy have all produced outstanding champions.

Here are a few pictures of Amber’s puppies from about 7 and a half weeks to 8 weeks.

I’m anxious to get their eye checks done and figure out who is going where. It will yank my heart strings to see any of them go, but it’s never practical to keep them all, even if I could.

NOTE: Before Amber’s puppies were born, I thought we would have NO WHITE PUPPIES because Jax’s owner thought he was not white factored. But Jax’s sire– the great Silver Grand Champion Aurealis Endeavor– is definitely white factored so it was quite possible that Jax was also white factored. Now that Jax has produced white puppies it shows that he MUST BE white factored. Now we have good DNA tests available that give us color genetics of our dogs as well as screen them for numerous genetically based conditions.

You can’t always tell a collie’s color genetics just by looking. I thought our sable girl Bridgit had no tricolor gene because she had no tricolor puppies in her first two litters when bred to tri factored sable males. But when bred for her third litter to another tri factored sable stud, she produced two tricolor puppies. And now we know Bridgit is tri-factored after all, which has also been confirmed by DNA.