Breeding dogs is an incredibly time consuming and all encompassing activity. Our whole life revolves around what the dogs are doing.

This in no way takes away from the importance of our family, our faith and our well being – but it certainly impacts it!

So as we ‘mature’ we have finished our fostering career. After 16 years we feel as though we’ve done all we could do, and that we needed to release time and energy into other things.

This has meant some physical work doing on the house following their departure. This adds to installing an extra kitchen into a utility room which has made a huge difference to managing puppies, as well as helping in general dog care.

We will be removing our astro turf and replacing it with porcelain non slip tiles, as despite our best efforts we can never keep the astro turf clean. It has its own smell, plus holds the smell of urine although we pressure wash it regularly.

We have retired Skye, Evie and Poppy. Evie had a lump in her mammary glands and so had that removed completely. All is fine and she’s doing well. Poppy had a lump on her skin and we have had that removed too. She too is doing well – still hating fireworks though.