Then I heard from Diane, who has Miss Prissy. Prissy is a character, as you can see! She lives with 4 other Akitas in Delaware; Mouse, who is 12 and a littermate to our Wheezer and Jellybean; Pez, who is a rescue dog from the Lorber rescue; Pele, know also as Bug, who has a pin in his leg after being stepped on by his mother at 4 weeks of age; and Sitka, daughter of our Babs, who is the leader of the pack. Prissy would like to take over as the boss, but Sitka is still fully in charge.

"Miss Prissy has become a kleptomaniac!! She steals stuff and hides it in Bugs crate..I know it is not Buggy.(this is a different Bugs than the puppy at our house!) She then goes into his crate and takes a nap with all her possessions. She is too funny. I guess his crate is better than her's..I don't know why. She slept there last night, it was easier that dragging her out and putting her into her own. I don't think he cares since he doesn't sleep in one"

I love when I get updates about our puppies, and I was happy to see I got two this morning, from our December white litter. First I heard from Casey about Pearl - Pearl was always the leader of the pack and in constant motion. I don't think she's changed! Pearl lives in Alaska with Ch. DJ, who is our Paula's littermate.

"Pearl is doing good. She is getting big! She just finished her puppy class and she did pretty good. I am going to be teaching the next session, so I hope she doesn't embarrass me too much as the demo dog:) She just gets really excited to see all the other dogs and she wants to play (and make sure she is the only one who drinks out of the water bucket).

She and DJ are getting along pretty well. He thinks she is a little crazy, but he is being good. She is just always wild when she gets to play with him. Plus she likes to stalk him and then pounce and I'm not sure he knows what to do with that. He's funny, he plays for a minute then he tries to get away. She has been busy stalking and chasing butterflies in the back yard. She also saw her first moose, but she thought that was pretty scary!"

Its been raining for the past couple of days, and we are all tired of it! At least its not hot. The pups have been trying to see how deep they can dig in their little yard, and yesterday Peter managed to dig a hole deep enough to stick his head under the fence and get it stuck there. I had to go in there and push his head down to the ground while pulling him out at the same time. Marc filled in the hole and within about 2 minutes, Peter was ready to do it again! Several bricks and a new bag of mulch put an end to that little construction project.

Bugs found better entertainment - learning how to get up and down the old chair we put in there for the pups to play on. He now thinks he is the king of the mountain.



In other big news, somebody either found or caught a baby sparrow this morning and made short work of it. I found it when I went out in the yard to see what the big attraction was to one particular spot. Thank goodness it wasn't mangled, just very wet. It may have fallen out of a tree, but it had feathers and looked like a miniature adult, so I wonder if it was learning to fly and wasn't very successful at it? This really is not the best yard for birds learning to fly!

I'm going to enter the 21st century and add a blog onto our website - www.nutmegakitas.com - our dogs can be so funny, this is the perfect spot to tell about some of their antics and update our activities.

We are Lonny and Marc of Nutmeg Akitas, and all our dogs, ranging in age from 12+ years to 8 weeks. We sadly lost our oldest girl, Lisa Sausage, a couple of weeks ago at over 15 years of age. Her kids, Ch. Wheezer and Ch. Jellybean, are still going strong at over 12. You can see most of our dogs on our website - I'll be updating that with more photos soon.

Right now we are busy with the two pups, Peter and Bugs, and are getting Nemo ready to go live with his handler for a few weeks while he learns the ropes of being a show dog. He's a very exuberant dog - I hope he's not leaping around the ring like a fool! Nemo came to us from Chris in Greece, and we are thrilled to have this lovely brindle boy with us.

Here are the pups playing around the tree.