Oh Yeah, You Blend

Trulli, Evie and I attended the Sheyla Gutierrez seminar at PDS this weekend. What a great coach Sheyla is. She did a really good job of spotting the tweaks we need. I am super proud of both of them. Seminars can be hard on dogs, because it’s similar to a trial in that there are bursts of intense activity and focus interspersed with long periods of downtime. There is the added factor of the actual teaching and discussion with the presenter, so your dog needs to maintain their focus for quite some time even while the handler’s attention is on the presenter. Both girls did incredibly well at this.

I really enjoyed working with Sheyla, her communication and teaching style really worked for me. And she did an amazing job of working to each team’s needs. I highly recommend taking a seminar with her if you have the opportunity.

Trulli was first. I entered her in the young dog sequencing seminar with just jumps and tunnels. I’d stopped trialing her for a while after I noticed her experiencing some ring stress stickiness. We’ve been working pretty hard over the summer, doing Laura Bussing’s Ring Stressed course online, and in person. And working through Jess Martin’s Focus30 course too (this course absolutely changed my life with Evie for the better, and it helped Trulli too).

Because I stopped trialing her, and we’ve only been doing very short, motivational, simple sequences for several months now, I had no idea how she’d do at the seminar. Well she absolutely blew my mind with how well she did. She worked her heart out, didn’t stress down, only got sticky a couple of times which made me see a hole in our training (same with Evie jumping towards a wall is hard for them), but she worked through it. She really really rose to the challenge. I am incredibly proud of her. She was so excited at one point with driving a line that she was hackling up.

Evie really did well too. She was in the more advanced handling sequences session, and while some of it was above our pay grade, she is a working dog and she will always always try. She showed her “goer” personality (Trulli is more of a thinker), but really kept her brain inside her skull and worked very hard. I just love running with her. I can feel improvement in our teamwork every time.

Jim and I are very excited to welcome Kleinhaus Trulli Madly Deeply at Alkemi LT to our pack! Two weeks ago I drove to Massachusetts to meet these little monsters, and this little girl cuddled into me, took a deep breath, and melted. And then so did I. So on Friday after the agility trial I went and picked her up. She’s been doing great: stable, brave, bold, sassy, smart, and adaptable (just my kind of dog).

Trulli (pronounced “truly”) is out of a very genetically diverse breeding (as diverse as you can get in Vallhunds, with parents who carry the least common alleles, this was a BetterBred “10” breeding for those who follow that), so I knew I might be interested just from that standpoint when I learned Kat Klein was planning this litter. That, combined with the fact that Kat does an absolutely stellar job of raising her litters, meant that I just couldn’t say no once I met her.

Trulli is named after the Formula 1 driver Jarno Trulli (because of course she is). Because she was born near Valentine’s Day I knew I wanted a Valentine’s sort of name, and her name just came to me as I drove home from meeting her that first time.

The last puppy in our house that I didn’t breed was Nina, so it’s been a while since I didn’t grow my own. Thank you so much for trusting us with this little girl Kat!