She's tricky!

Oh, Alpha, can you be any cuter? 

What's that? You can even do adorable tricks? 

Oh, Alfalfa Sprout - you are the cutest puppy! 

Tiny tennis balls are a girl's best friend

Alpha is madly in love with tiny, squeaky tennis balls. When she gets up in the morning she'll race into the living room to find a tennis ball and then she'll pretty much carry it around all day long. And when she's not carrying it around, she holds it between her front paws and sometimes she'll have a huge smile:

She also likes to stand in front of us and let out one loud bark every minute until we give in and throw the ball to her repeatedly.

She's always been obsessed with tennis balls since she was just a tiny puppy. Here's a video of her catching tennis balls over and over and over when she was 6 months old:

Not sure where she got it from because we never taught her to catch, she just found a tiny tennis ball lying around and it was love at first sight! 

So... how many dogs out there are getting rid of their winter coats and growing in shiny new spring coats? Nari decided she had enough of her winter coat so I've been brushing her. This is the second time she was brushed this week: 

I'm still amazed at how much fur these guys have in their undercoat - where the heck does all this fur come from? And this was the second time I brushed a huge furball off Nari in the last week. By the way, they are totally worth all of the grooming work (which really isn't that hard) and all of the fur tumbleweeds I pick up around the house. 

One more thing - we have another follower!! Thanks so much to everyone who follows us and posts comments:) 

Food and spring - both things the girls love!

First - I just wanted to say hi to all my new followers! Glad you're here and thanks so much for stopping by :) It's been pretty crazy around here so I'm afraid I haven't been posting much but things have finally calmed down so I'll be posting more. 

Spring is finally here! Good thing because the dogs had been going crazy and running laps in the house. Nari enjoys screaming and trying to convince us to either take her on hikes or do agility - that girls never rests. 

We finally got some nice weather last week so I took all of the girls out to the agility field to run around and practice a little. Here's a picture of a dirty Starbuck:

Here's how she got all dirty:

Now onto food! I went to the doggie bakery and got some 'paw-reos' for the girls. Actually, Nari bought the treats for her and her sisters with her Steeplechase winnings :) Here are the girls super focused on the plate of 'paw-reos':

Nari was really going crazy over those cookies: 

As if paw-reos weren't exciting enough, Aaron made the girls a huge batch of their homemade dog food. They go crazy for that stuff. I even use it during training because they love it more than treats. The girls were quite excited that they got to lick the pan:

And Nari just loved licking the spoon! 

Our Spectacular Tongue-tacular contest entry!!

I read about this great Tongue-tacular contest over on Adventures of Anna the GSD so I thought I would post some tongue pictures of the girls for our entry! You can check out the contest ----> HERE. 

Isn't that a great picture :) 

Well, I thought I would have a tough time finding some tongue pictures but it turns out I have a bunch of them. So here are some of my favorites! 

First up - Nari's crazy long tongue that she gets after I have finally tired her out:

I don't know what to call this one - truck tongue (see the horse driving one of those truck things, I have no idea what's going on here...)? 

Now for a group of tasty tongues! Followed by a Nari tongue cleaning the spoon. 

This would be the crazy Nari tongue that I see when she is bugging the crap out of me to take her on a long hike: 

She'll just stand there and yell at me and then start staring at me with this look until I give in. And here is a tired Starbuck tongue:

Now Miss Starbuck, therapy dogs don't stick out their tongues:

And therapy dogs certainly shouldn't be rolling around in the dirt while sticking out their tongues: 

Oh, Starbuck, how I love your crazy tongue: 

And of course I can't forget the cutest, longest tongue in the family - Alpha's! Her tongue gets crazy long when she's panting: 

Isn't she the cutest in this adorable collar: 

And these are my favorite Alpha smiles, so big you can see her whole tongue! 

Well, I think that was a great contest idea - so head on over here to go enter. You have until noon on Friday, March 11th. Maybe I should have a contest someday.... 

I'm back!! And Starbuck has some fancy boots!

It's been a long time since I've posted anything! Let's see.... I had a couple of agility trials, went to Vegas, got sick, filled up my hard drive, husband's computer died so then I got a new computer!!!! YES! Which means I can now have 1080p videos on YouTube! Oh, and I finally have the latest iMovie. 


We noticed at flyball that Starbuck's wrists were bending back a little too much on her boxturn so I got her some fancy new Z-Control Skid boots. They are black with a orange stripe on the back and have sparkly orange lightening bolts on the front!!! 


Here is a video of Starbuck getting used to the boots:

Run, Nari, RUN!! Focus, Steffi, FOCUS!

WOW - what a great weekend! No, actually I think it was an amazing weekend :) 

I packed up the car last Friday morning and Nari and I headed off to Holly Springs, MS for the 4 PAWS USDAA trial on Saturday and Sunday. I think that was the first time I had ever been to Mississippi before. I usually don't drive that far for a 2 day trial, but everyone in that club is so nice we made the drive to support them. 

We were entered in all three tournament classes and a couple of titling classes each day. The trial secretary was awesome and found a team for us right before closing - we were teamed up with a JRT named Han Solo and a BC named Rex - both of which were super fast and their handlers were so much fun. Our team did really well and we qualified!! We were all so excited because it was the first team Q that each of the dogs had gotten. We were pretty close to the cutoff line (and were under it for a class or two) but we held it together during the relay. Nari pulled off some great runs during her team events, I was just so proud of how hard she worked! Here is a picture of team "Han In Rex":

Here are some highlights:

We won both the Steeplechase and Grand Prix tournaments for our height. 

We got 8 Q's - and I think we got a Q in all of the individual events in DAM. 

Besides the 1st places in Steeplechase and Grand Prix, we took 2nd in everything else.

AND.... 

...I'm pretty sure we qualified for the 2011 USDAA Cynosport World Games Agility Championships in Steeplechase and DAM!!!! 

I am of course waiting for the USDAA office to confirm it because I'm always paranoid about that kind of stuff, but it will be a while before the results get recorded... 

And the awesome sheltie handler in our height group (she takes 1st pretty much all the time and has killer runs) came up to us and said, "Wow! You guys were the sh*t this weekend!" as we were leaving :) That meant so much to me :) 


We also had a great handler in Masters tell us that we handled a hard jump combo with a wrap the best he had seen so far, I couldn't believe it :) Huge thanks goes out to our trainer, Ace, for helping us with our jump wraps! 


I worked my butt off this weekend on trying to keep my focus, keep my energy up and not give up and it really payed off. Such a fun weekend! Now we need to keep working on increasing our speed and some other fundamentals. Agility is so much fun! 

Pictures from the Carolina Peidmont USDAA 4-Star Event!

Nari and I had so much fun at the CPA USDAA 4-Star Event. We just recently started running in all of the Masters classes back in October so the courses really kick our butts sometimes, but we have a blast. And I'm so lucky to have Nari, she's such an awesome partner. I love that when I make a mistake, she's right there to yell at me. When we first started trialing I would run Snooker pretty slow with her and a couple of times she actually yelled at me and nipped me in the butt! Now if we go slower than she would like, she goes through the course going, "Ahhhh! Ahhhh! Ahhh!" repeatedly but still follows me. She always cracks me up and makes the runs so much fun. 


Well, our favorite photographer, Suzie Wolf, was at the trial so we got some great pictures! 

Isn't she the cutest weaver? That's from our Masters Standard run on Jan. 15, 2011. 

There we are racing through round 1 of the Steeplechase - probably one of our best runs ever. So much fun and so exciting that we were able to qualify even though there were some super fast 16" dogs in our group! 

I love this picture! It's also from round 1 of the Steeplechase. 

And here she is in round 2 of the Steeplechase. I just love how her tail stays curly the whole time - so cute! 

And another jump pose during round 2 of the Steeplechase. 

The rest of the photos are from our Masters Standard run on Jan. 17th, 2011. Kind of a crazy run - we were both so tired and then there was the huge group of kids (> 50!) sitting in the stands right next to the table. Nari jumped on the table and then started yelling at me about those kids so much that she hacked up a treat and then did her table down! Oh Nari :) 

I love this photo of us. 

And I think she is one of the cutest jumpers.