A Day in The Life
Most of us come to work every day— in fact, Reino and Julie technically HAVE to come to work every day because they live here! While we’re mostly a private in-home setting, we do have workers to help us get the dogs taken care of. There’s a LOT that goes into it, so I thought it might be fun to show off a drastically simplified outline of our everyday routine.
Morning Chores
Kristin and her family
Our day starts at 8 AM! We start out in our puppy nursery, making sure puppies are all okay, and letting mamas out for a break from spending over night in the kennel with their puppies. We make sure to clean each kennel if there’s been an accident, and change out the bedding so that everything is fresh and clean for the young pups.
Next up on our task list is our main area kiddos (play pens included) and the back room/ grooming area, where we keep all of our girls that are in heat. To lessen any noise that our neighbors might hear, and keep a consistent routine, we start letting out our dogs at 9 AM. Before then, we’re generally just making sure the floors are nice and clean to start the day, and changing out food and water bowls to make sure that everybody gets a fresh start. While we’re letting out the dogs and our older puppies, we’re also starting laundry and changing out all the bedding they had during the nighttime, so that by the time evening comes, they’ll have a nice cozy bed to cuddle up into.
Once all of the hard labor is done, changing things out and cleaning up food and water bowls, the next step is to do another deep clean on all of our floors. Our floors get dirty pretty quickly, so we’re usually mopping 3-4 times/day. We also have to make sure the laundry is always running to make sure our dog beds, towels, reusable pee pads, everything is getting dry by the end of the day.
Daily Scheduled Tasks
Olivia & Zion’s “Stella” & “Luna”
This section of our day is where our daily routines start to diverge a bit. Instead of a team effort to get everybody taken care of, we generally divide and conquer when it comes to this next part. Of course we’ll help out each other as needed, but we all are typically in charge of taking care of different things.
My daily scheduled task is generally my picture schedule. I’m pretty strict on when I’m taking pictures of each puppy, and I usually do most of my pictures on Mondays and Tuesdays to get the bulk done as early in the week as I can. Sometimes I’ll have an older puppy or two to take care of on Thursdays and Fridays if my week is pretty full. Generally speaking, I’m doing pictures from 9:30/10 AM to 12:30/1:00 PM. It involves a lot of bathing/ blow-drying puppies, trimming around their eyes, sometimes even full grooms. But for the most part, it is all about patience with actually taking the picture! My edits usually go pretty quick as I’m just finding my favorites from each shoot, cropping, color-fixing, and adding watermarks, but can still be time-consuming if I have a lot of puppies to do. My bonus daily-task is generally all the marketing efforts that I make on selling our puppies. I do all of our Facebook posts, while Brindy works on our Instagram engagement. I really don’t have the time to both, but I wish I did! There’s always more to do, but these are things that have to get done every day!
Arik’s daily scheduled task is taking care of Weights, Dewormings, and Vaccinations. We have weight sheets that we send out each morning for Arik to fill out. The weight sheets help us accurately determine the size the puppy may be when it’s fully grown, while helping us chart the puppy’s growth. While running through weights of each puppy, there is also a list of vaccinations and deworming deadlines that we keep up in our puppy nursery, so that we can all be on the same track with what needs to be administered when. When Arik isn’t here, Kristin or I generally take care of this task.
Moira
Kristin’s daily scheduled task is taking care of breedings. Every day she checks how close each girl that is in heat is to needing to be bred. She’s very meticulous with this task, and even asks for second opinions based on what she sees. She also reminds Julie and I that we need to narrow down which stud we want to use for certain females if we’re undecided. Kristin’s bonus daily-task is taking dogs to and from their vet appointments and consulting with them about our dogs’ health if we have an appointment.
Brecklyn’s daily scheduled task is grooming the dogs. She has a grooming list that alternates months, so she’s grooming every dog every 2 months. They are so spoiled! She gives them a bath, trims nails, cleans their ears, and gives them a nice haircut so that they can stay their best for the next 2 months.
Afternoon Chores
The best part about working in the afternoon is that most of the work from the morning chores are over. As a team, our main goal for this part of the day is to keep the floors as clean as we can, make sure laundry is still running, and that we’re putting laundry away. Kristin leaves during the afternoon, so afternoon chores are usually maintained by Arik.
Julie & I are both pretty busy in the afternoons. We’re both back here working on emails, and sending out necessary steps for our customer to prepare to meet their future Idaho Jewels Poodle! It’s a lot of work, and a lot of waiting and crossing your fingers that you get a response before the work day ends! I am also setting up blog posts in the afternoon for the coming week, and wrapping up our work.
Puppies of the Week
Newly listed! Tootsie & Pegasus’ little brown toy cuties are brand new to our website. They are so precious, and we’re so excited to find them their forever homes! Stay tuned as we’ll be doing personality descriptions on them soon!
