Meet Bella!

March 12th, 2021

The story of how we ended up with Bella is quite sudden. I had seen a post about her on Facebook from a breeder who was originally hoping to use her as another female to breed in her program. She then found out she was deaf and like any good breeder, she (for lack of a better term) “fired” her from her breeding program. Though she wished to keep her, ultimately she made the tough decision to seek out another home where she can live out her days as a family pet, and that’s where we come in. We never thought we would be adding a third dog to our pack, even just part-time as she will be living with my parents in California, but here we are. She is currently just 6 months old, and we plan to train her for a couple months until COVID restrictions open up enough for my parents to come visit and after we are all vaccinated.

Due to having decades worth of sheepdog experience, the breeder knew we would be the right people for Bella. As the breeder was located in Utah, we had to create and change some plans around a bit in order to pick her up, but it all worked out well. The breeder was fortunately just 30 minutes from Scott’s parents house, so with just a few days notice we headed there for the weekend. We left on the morning of Friday, March 12th and arrived at Scott’s parents that afternoon. We timed our drive out there relatively well to account for the incoming snowstorm that would be hitting Colorado Friday evening and through the weekend. As you will read, our drive back was snowy and stressful but we made it back in one piece.

March 13th, 2021

Bella’s “Gotcha Day”! We picked Bella up Saturday morning and fell in love with her almost instantly. She was so excited to meet us! Her whole body was wiggling with excitement and before we knew it we were driving back to Scott’s parents with another sheepdog.

Once back at the house we allowed Maxi and Bella to meet first thing. Maxi is very good with other dogs so we weren’t worried about him meeting Bella. Both did very well with their introduction. Zeus on the other hand requires a slower introduction, mostly due to his dominant play style and his excitement barks that tend to scare other dogs. Over the course of 3 days we gradually allowed Zeus and Bella to interact more and more, and before long they were playing nicely together.

Below are just some of the pictures we took of and with her on her first day with us. The hair around her eyes was a little overgrown, but she has one blue and one brown eye.

March 15th, 2021

Due to having a 6 and a half hour drive back home to Colorado, we wanted to make sure all dogs would be OK with each other in the car. For this we drove down the nearby canyon to a local waterfall, and I’m pleased to say that all dogs did well in the car together and we had no issues. Then we spent about an hour out exploring this area.

Though the process of getting Bella was very smooth, as I mentioned, this was also the weekend that a huge snowstorm would be heading to Colorado, and when I say huge, it ended up bringing upwards of 30 inches of snow to parts of Fort Collins, and much more to the mountains. Usually we would prefer to take I-80 back to Fort Collins, but after receiving a substantial amount of snow, that highway was closed with no estimated time to reopen. This unfortunately resulted in us driving I-70 back on Wednesday, and though it’s a very pretty drive, the combination of extremely snowy conditions and lots of cars on the roadway was a bit of a disaster. As we were driving up the mountain corridor the snow on the highway gradually got worse to the point that you couldn’t tell if you were driving in a lane or not. People without 4 wheel drive or all wheel drive were sliding everywhere, including semi trucks, dodging and passing them was terrifying. After a 7 hour turned 12 hour car ride, we made it home safely, but not without getting stuck on our street right in front of our house (I’ll take that over I-70 any day). Scott did the honors of shoveling the couple feet of snow so that the car would be somewhat out of the way if others decided to conquer the roads, but otherwise we saved the rest of the shoveling job for the following day as it was already very late. Despite all this, the 3 dogs did great in the car together!

Continue to follow along with our adventures with Bella before she heads to California! Don’t worry though, we’ll see her often!