Updates

First, an update on the pups.  They had their first soaked kibble the other day-at just over three weeks old:

At first, a few of them didn't quite get it.

But they figured it out pretty quick.

Taking a nap after their meal on day three of kibble.

Brute-the brown guy here, and the last of the pups from earlier this summer-checking the new pups out.

Starting to play...

With mom-they're getting pretty big!

Brute getting in on some of the pup's food.

We've decided on names, and I will be doing a separate post on that soon.

We also had something else good for our kennel happen recently.  We have a new kennel supporter!  He is a friend of Jeremy's and a great welder.
 We have had a hard time finding snow hooks that we really like-a snow hook is like a parking brake for a sled-you hook it down into the snow (hopefully hard packed) when you stop if you need to stop for any period of time to get off the sled, etc.  The hooks that we've been using have been unreliable at best, and just plain useless at worst.  Our friend Matt, who we did some training with last winter, has a snow hook that we were jealous of.  He was reliably hooking down with 12 dogs on the line and no problems.  It turns out this particular snow hook came from Alaska and the company has no website or anything-Matt has friends that know people that lined it up for him. 
 So Jeremy thought to ask this welder friend if he would be able to basically duplicate this design.  He said he could, so we borrowed Matt's hook for a pattern and a couple weeks later, we now have two new snow hooks that are not quite exactly the same-he and Jeremy put their heads together and made a couple minor changes to the design, but the results are amazing and we CANNOT wait to try them out!  He gave us a crazy good deal on them and we can't thank him enough.  It may not seem like much to him because he's so good at what he does, but this means a great deal to a kennel on a limited budget-everything counts and this is a big thing!

They are not painted yet-we are going to look into having them powder coated.  One of the things we really love is that they weigh about half of what our old hooks weigh, but they are still strong!