When does God sleep?

The title was a question that Jaida, our 4 year old asked me yesterday...My answer, "um, I don't know honey, good question." I thought it was too cute not to mention.

So, we are back from Virginia and the VCA National field trial! We had a wonderful time and met some very nice people. We finally got to see Rogue and had a great time watching her run! She ran big and bold and I swear she had a smile on her face the whole time! I was not able to get any pictures of her run, as I was on horseback for the first time in several years and needed to concentrate on what I was doing! I had also never ridden a gaited horse before, it was an odd an interesting ride!

Our campsite at Nationals...We had a view of the breakaway and a bunch of the property! Sweet!

Sadly, Rogue had 2 false points, which I have never seen happen with her before. Carrie Syczylo of Durite Vizslas, where Rogue has been for the last several weeks, was handling her. She was confused by the false points as she had never seen Rogue do that either. Well, it might have been explained the next day when Rogue came into heat(females coming into season will often do wacky things outside of character)..So, due to that, no placements. (she also had a bracemate that tagged and bumped her about half the brace, annoying) People who saw the brace though, said it was the most interesting one of the day!

Jaida on her first "real" horse ride. Carrie took her out for an entire brace, so Jaida rode for 45 minutes! She is now trying to convince Daddy to get some horses!

We didn't get to do anything outside of the trial as we had initially hoped, we had truck trouble on the way down and our Suburban spent 2 days at the shop being looked at. The mechanic was unable to find the problem, so now, yet again, our truck sits at the repair shop nearby. On the way home we did have a lovely dinner with my cousin, Amanda, whom I haven't seen in several years and who had never met Jaida. It was quite nice to see her, she only lived 20 minutes from where we were all week!

While in Virginia Kyler decided that it was time to be bred, as opposed to the week before, as originally planned with a more local stud dog. So, we ended up breeding her to Duke, Rogue's dad, who we had originally planned to breed Kyler to this summer for one last litter. Carrie likes Rogue so much she is hoping to reproduce a similar dog from a repeat breeding! If this breeding took she will be due in early January. We have a list of people anxiously awaiting the news of their future puppy!

So, today, Mike took Rogue out for her first "real" hunting trip. We weren't sure if it would go well at all since she is essentially a trial dog and bred and trained to run from horseback, not foot. However, our little red girl surprised us with a great morning! She ran big, but manageable, per Mike. (we had the Garmin Astro GPS collar on her, of course!) She had 2 pheasant finds, one that she was just narrowing down when it flushed and a second one that she pointed solidly and held until Mike flushed it. He was able to shoot it and Rogue ran out to retrieve the bird. This was the first official bird that Rogue has had shot for her. We have done retrieving practice in the yard with a frozen bird, but never the "real" thing. She did just what was expected of her! She ran around for a minute with the rooster, extremely excited about it all, then nicely brought it to Mike's hand and went on her way. Couldn't ask more from a young dog and her first bird! She now sleeps nicely on the couch! Yeah!

Here is Rogue with her rooster in the yard. Mike had put it down on the porch to unload some things and Rogue found it.

Pretty decent size rooster for her!