Meet My Fur-babies.

Not Your Average Mom

My husband and I don't have traditional kids. Right now we are loving just living our life and spending quality time together having fun. One of the things we enjoy together is dog training. You might call us strict parents but our kids are all the better for it!

We spend lots of time with our dogs and are huge advocates for banning breed restrictive laws  also known as Breed Specific Legislation or BSL. 

No mean or harsh techniques, we use positive reinforcement and lots of quality time.

Both of our pups are rescue dogs #RescueDogs, previously we had a deaf German Shepard who passed away from kidney disease and a rescue Border Collie. All of our dogs know hand signals, and respond when called. We spend lots of time training and exercising our dogs so that they are happy, well balanced, socialized, mannered, and generally on their best behavior. In turn they get spoiled because we absolutely love them like kids you would say. I love #Dogs.

Meet Dante! He's a gorgeous brindle bully, as far as his breed goes he fits the breed description of an American Staffordshire Terrier, but its been rumored that he is half boxer.  :-) He has a ton of energy and is always ready to play. When we were looking for a new dog to add to our happy little family we wanted a buddy who could keep up with our active lifestyle. A dog who could carry a pack for hiking, snow shoeing, maybe get into ski-joring (i'll explain that in a different post), a dog who is smart and looking for challenges that I could take anywhere and feel perfectly safe with, and preferably large in size (i've always loved big dogs).  

I've grown up around bully breeds, my grandma always had an American Pitbull Terrier or mix of some kind and they are wonderful dogs. They are also extreme atheletes and not for the average dog owner, they require lots of socialization, training, and exercise or they can drive you crazy!

So when we contacted the rescue group and described our personalities and lifestyle they felt that he would be our perfect match! And we couldn't agree more!

He loves to play tug-of-war. We attached a rope to a Kong toy and now he fetches too!

The rescue was right! We had him "heeling" and walking perfectly on a leash within 2 days, and off-leash "heeling" in a week!

Dante's First Snowshoeing Experience

He was a great snow shoe buddy! We had a jacket and shoes for him to wear, and he carried the water for us. His pack weighed at the beginning of the trip 3 pounds and he did great! Keep in mind it got lighter as we went being that it was just water. We did a total round trip of 6 miles it was an all day hike but it was a ton of fun! We were so tired when we got back to the car that we had to lift him in.

 Since this experience he has joined us for many hikes, and I lend him out to family members as a running buddy. 

After the loss of our Border Collie we wanted to get Dante a little sister. Again we contacted a local rescue group to find the perfect match. This time what we were looking for was slightly different. Having such an active guy we needed a dog who could keep up, but since Dante is on the high end of the energy scale we wanted our second dog to be a little more mellow so that they wouldn't destroy our house with their playtime. We also wanted a female, males and females tend to be a good match, two males can cause dominant behaviors and females can get bossy with each other.

We found our perfect match in a beautiful pup (almost 1 year old) that we named Ziva a beautiful American Pitbull Terrier!

Ziva loves to fetch any sort of ball, and she is much easier to pet than Dante (his wiggly butt get's in the way sometimes). She's a quieter and softer personality but can play rough like any boy! They are the perfect match for each other and us.

They bonded immediately! They love to snuggle together.

Ziva's first bath, we bathed them together.

Both our pups are friendly to both dogs and other people, and have done a great job as ambassadors for bully breeds!