It was a mystery...

Siren's pups are safely tucked into their wonderful homes. Jo is keeping Ceri and about now is wondering why. Puppies are fun, adorable, delightful, snuggly and maybe the best thing in the world. They are also mischievous, destructive, stubborn, and busy! But Ceri is too, too cute and no one can stay mad at her for long!

Just when I thought I would get the fall and winter off from puppy rearing, our Cirneco dell'Etna Rowan let me in on a little secret she'd been carrying.

It seems she had fallen deeply in love (or something) with...

 Denim, the blue whippet.

And she found herself in an awkward predicament.

But as I told her, though it was certainly not something we would plan, puppies are puppies and we love them all. She presented us with six black Cirpets (pronounced Chir-pets) on August 14,

Why black? Humor me while I give a micro-genetics lesson. The color blue in whippets is actually black with a dilution gene. Think of it as pouring bleach over a black dog (but don't try this at home). The dilution gene is recessive, though, which means both parents have to carry it before they can produce dilute puppies. Rowan, being a Cirneco, does not carry a dilute gene. Also, black is dominant to chestnut, so about the only color we could get was black. 

And boy were they black. We had to color code them as they were born so we could tell them apart. Two girls, four boys, all healthy.

Since we didn't know how Rowan got pregnant,we gave them a Mystery theme.  Well, wait. We did know how she got pregnant (we have, after all, been breeding dogs for 30 years or so), we just didn't know when or how they managed their little tryst. So the puppies were named for classic mystery writers: Edgar Allan Poe, Dashiell Hammett, Daphne du Maurier, Agatha Christie, Arthur Conan Doyle, and Wilkie Collins.

Stay tuned for part two.