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I LOVE My Goldendoodle!

Posted by Kathy Torrence on Jul 21, 2007 in Our Goldendoodle Puppies

I can’t say enough how much I love Daisy, our goldendoodle puppy!

She is just so sweet and so smart – we had our Intermediate Puppy Class at PetSmart the other day and she was SO good – she had no problems executing any of the commands.  She was the only dog in the class that would do a Sit-Stay while I walked all the way across the ring and back – good dog!

Here are a few photos taken today…

She loves to sleep on her back and when she stretches out, she’s so LONG!  I think she’s going to be a very tall dog like a standard poodle.

daisy-stretched-out.JPG

And here’s another idea of how big she’s gotten at 5 1/2 months – here she is with my almost-13-year-old son Andrew.  They are best friends – she looks up at his top bunk bed and cries whenever he’s not here…

andrew-and-daisy.JPG

 
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Daisy Is Getting SOOOO Big!

Posted by Kathy Torrence on Jul 17, 2007 in Our Goldendoodle Puppies

I haven’t posted in my ‘Watch Daisy Grow’ category for a while, so I thought I’d post a recent photo to show you just how big my goldendoodle has grown. Here she is kissing our friend Cailin yesterday:

Daisy kissing Cailin

Daisy is about 5 1/2 months old now – isn’t she adorable (and big!)?

 
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Where have I been?!?!

Posted by Kathy Torrence on Jul 16, 2007 in Family Stuff, Our Goldendoodle Puppies

Okay – I know that it’s been a while since I’ve posted…a LONG while, I just realized!

So…where have I been? Out in the sun, enjoying the beautiful warm weather – it’s summer, for goodness sakes! 😉

My family and I have a membership to Lake Kandle – a nice, old fashioned lake and swim club. My kids took swim lessons every day for two weeks, and since we were already there, we just stayed for the day. Every day. For two weeks. THAT’S why I haven’t posted. But I am getting very tan, if I do say so myself.

We had an odd July 4th – the weather was not the best, so we decided to just stick around home for the day. Mike and the kids went to the Pitman parade and I volunteered for our church’s Open House in the afternoon. We just completed a new church building and opened it up so that the community could come and see what we’ve done. We had a great turnout – several hundred people came through. You can see our new building at the Pitman United Methodist Church website. Then we watched the 4th of July fireworks right from our front yard. Every year, our little town (Pitman, NJ) has a fireworks display at Alcyon Lake – which happens to be at the end of our street. So we set up chairs out front and watch them in comfort – we don’t have to deal with traffic, finding a parking spot or whining kids (well…the kids still whine, but we can just send them inside) – it’s a nice tradition that we enjoy every year.

We also were away all last week on a camping trip at Big Timber Lake Camping Resort in Cape May Court House, NJ. We reserved our site last year so that we would be right next to the swimming lake – here’s the view from our campsite:

View from our campsite

Btl - view from our campsite

It was WONDERFUL to be so close to the lake!!! At night, after it closed, it was like we had our own private beach. And the kids took advantage of that to play in the sand and look up at the stars.

Unfortunately, Mike had to work all week, so it wasn’t much of a vacation for him. But the kids and I had a great time.

So did Daisy Doodle. She was QUITE the center of attention! In addition to being close to the lake, we were also right on a path where people walked by all day long. Here’s a shot of her and Emily watching the people go by….

Emily and Daisy

So…Daisy’s MO was to sit there looking all cute and everything until people stopped to pet her. How could you resist this face?

Daisy

Well…let me tell you – no one could resist her charms! By the time we left, Daisy practically had her own fan club. Other campers were coming up and having their pictures taken with OUR DOG! One man took a photo on his cell phone and mailed it to his fiance. When she saw it, she drove all the way out to the campground to see Daisy in person. And there was one French-Canadian family that came by every single day and spoke to her in French. They said that they never saw a dog that made them so happy (let me just say that if Daisy went missing, the first place I was going to look would be Quebec – she had several French admirers during the week!).

As for me, I managed to finish several books – I started reading novels again this summer. Why did I stop reading them in the first place? Well…the problem is that I love reading SO much (and always have) that I tend to become so involved with the book – reading every minute I get – that I let everything else fall apart around me. But now that the kids are older, I find that I have more time to dedicate to reading – they don’t need all of my attention. As a matter of fact…I think I’ll start a new blog category about the books I’m reading this summer and my thoughts on them…

Anyway…I do have several craft projects to share with you, too…I’ll post them under the appropriate category…

 
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Another Great Camping Weekend

Posted by Kathy Torrence on Jun 11, 2007 in Family Stuff, Our Goldendoodle Puppies

We just got back from another weekend of camping at Otter Lake Resort in the Pocono Mountains – the weather was GORGEOUS! No rain for the Torrences this trip – how unusual…

We did get a really late start on Friday night because both Matt and Andrew had baseball games Friday evening- we didn’t arrive at the campsite until 11pm! But everyone slept in late the next morning, so we were well-rested and ready to go on Saturday.

The boys found some new friends and played basketball for a while on Saturday morning. We also swam in both the indoor pool and the lake – the kids really enjoyed seeing the fish in the lake swim right up to them. We also rented a pedal-powered boat in the afternoon – everyone got a turn…

Except for Daisy who sat not-so-patiently on the dock, watching us intently…

She did dip her feet and nose into the lake at one point – she looked really silly with a really fuzzy body and a narrow, wet head and paws!

Speaking of fuzzy – check out this photo of my son Matt with Daisy…what is it they say about people starting to look like their pets (at least in the hair, anyway…)?

Matt and Daisy

On Sunday, Mike, Andrew and Matt went hiking early in the morning at Bushkill Falls. They completed the Red Trail – 1,267 steps in all! Matt even got a T-shirt to prove it. Emily, Daisy and I stayed behind at the campground – the family hiked the shorter Blue Trail at Bushkill Falls last year and it was really hard for Emily to keep up with her little legs. So this year, we decided to just let the boys hike while we had a leisurely morning at the campsite.

The falls are so beautiful!

We also brought a new horseshoe-type game played with large washers – the boys loved it! We saw some other campers with the game last year and bought it ourselves to try out this year. It worked out really well – Mike and I even won a game against the kids. 🙂

Oh – and the caterpillars were still out in force. But this week, Emily decided to take a few of them home as her new ‘pets’. We picked up a little bug-catching kit at the Target Dollar Spot this week and she brought home about 4 or 5 of the little caterpillars along with a whole tiny habitat complete with rocks, leaves and sticks – this girl’s not afraid of bugs!

We all can’t wait to go back again to Otter Lake next weekend. It’s hard to believe that it’s not actually summer yet and that everyone has to go back to school and work tomorrow morning. Sure feels like vacation-time to me.

As for crafting, I did have some time while we were away to read a book about using transparencies in paper crafts. I got some good ideas and can’t wait to try them out…

 
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Daisy Graduated Puppy School!

Posted by Kathy Torrence on Jun 8, 2007 in Our Goldendoodle Puppies

Today Daisy finished her puppy obedience class at PetSmart! How cute is this picture?

She can sit, stay, walk on a loose leash, lay down, ‘leave it’, come on call, roll over and give a ‘high five’.

Here’s Daisy with me – this photo came out really weird because of the way I was squatting down, but she looks cute anyway…

After class today, I signed her up for the Intermediate Obedience class – it starts next week.

She also had her 4 month vet checkup last week – she is now almost 26 pounds (she was 18 at her last appointment). She’ll probably be about 50-60 pounds when she’s full grown – just a big, fluffy teddy bear!

 
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An Exhausting Day

Posted by Kathy Torrence on Jun 8, 2007 in Family Stuff, Our Goldendoodle Puppies

I don’t know how teachers do their job. I love my own kids (really, I do!), but spending a whole day with LOTS of kids – it’s just so draining for me!

Yesterday, I went on a field trip with my son Matt’s second grade class to the Cape May Zoo. Here are some little monkeys looking at the little monkeys:

We had a good time, but after trying to keep track of so many kids, I was just exhausted by the end of the trip. Teaching is definitely NOT the profession for me.

After the school day, my friends and I decided to get our dogs together for a little puppy playdate. I tried to take some photos, but the dogs were running around so fast, most of my pictures look like this:

The dogs had so much fun! On the left is Zoe, a Newfoundland; in the middle is Daisy, our goldendoodle; and on the right is Max, a golden/collie mix.

My friend Marie has a WONDERFUL pool, and her dog Zoe loves to swim in it. It so funny to be swimming at her house and see this HUGE black dog come in the pool and swim beside you!

We decided to see if Daisy would like to swim with the other dogs. Daisy did go in the pool (with some help from me) and she did swim, but I think it was still a little overwhelming for her with all the kids there. But I’m sure she’ll be swimming right along with her doggie friends by the end of the summer.

It was really a LONG day – in addition to the field trip and the doggie playdate, I also had a church meeting yesterday morning at 6:30am. And after the doggie swim fest, I had to feed the kids a super quick dinner and rush both boys off to baseball practice by 5:30pm. At the end of the day, I was in bed and asleep by 8:15 – am I getting old or what?!?!

 
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Camping at Otter Lake

Posted by Kathy Torrence on Jun 3, 2007 in Family Stuff, Our Goldendoodle Puppies

We just returned from a weekend camping trip to the Pennsylvania Pocono Mountains – what a wonderful weekend! We stayed at Otter Lake Camping Resort which was great. The campground is really tucked away in the woods – very secluded and close to nature. In fact, the whole weekend was full of nature! We saw a wild bear very close to our campground and I managed to get a picture:

I was more freaked out by the bear than the kids were! I had never seen a real, live, wild bear outside of a zoo before.

It was also apparently a time of the year when caterpillars drop from the trees by the millions. Don’t believe me? Check out this rock at our campsite:

Those little squirmy things? Caterpillars. They covered EVERYTHING – the ground, the rocks, the trees…and by the time we left this morning, our truck and camper, too. If you sat outside by the fire even for a few minutes, you could count on one or two caterpillars falling onto you whenever a slight breeze went by and shook the leaves above. At one point, Mike was so freaked out by a caterpillar landing on his hand that he flipped his wrist over and spilled his drink (a waste of a perfectly good margarita!). But I guess it’s better that they were caterpillars and not spiders or some other creepy, crawlies…right?

And of course, Daisy, our goldendoodle, had lots of them and other stuff caught in her fur all weekend. It was really hot and humid during the day yesterday, so the kids took turns squirting Daisy with their water pistols. But don’t feel bad for the dog – she LOVED it and followed Matt around until he squirted her.

Then she would bite and chew at the water – it was really funny to watch! Funny, that is, until we had a wet dog rolling around in the dirt…

So, even though it’s not supposed to be good for her fur, I just HAD to give her a bath when we got home. It’s amazing how little dog is under all that fluffy fur…

The dog was exhausted after our trip! On Saturday afternoon, she, Matt and I hiked for about 4 miles all the way around Otter Lake. At one point during our hike, she just plopped down on the ground and refused to go any further – what happened to all that puppy energy!?!

Matt, Emily and I also managed to go swimming in the lake for a little bit – it was really nice…

Unfortunately, soon after this photo was taken, we heard thunder and left the beach. It seemed that thunderstorms were popping up right overhead for most of the afternoon. You know it’s not a Torrence camping trip unless it rains, right?

 
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Nutty Dog

Posted by Kathy Torrence on May 31, 2007 in Our Goldendoodle Puppies

Here’s how Daisy took a nap this afternoon – her face is wet because she was sleeping with her head in her water bowl before she just rolled over and positioned herself like this:  

I can’t blame her – it was HOT today! 

 
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Daisy Is Four Months Old

Posted by Kathy Torrence on May 29, 2007 in Our Goldendoodle Puppies

Here’s a new photo of our goldendoodle pup with Pooh:

 
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Bath and a Haircut – Two Barks!

Posted by Kathy Torrence on May 24, 2007 in Our Goldendoodle Puppies

Daisy the goldendoodle is just the cutest little fluffball – especially after a bath!

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