Ashlee had some help from the dogs doing dishes.  We were watching Moxie, one of Nadia puppies a couple months ago.  Cinder and Nadia are in the habit of helping to clean the dishes.  Moxie was a quick learner and joined right in.  Each do had a side.  It was pretty funny.

Nadia is 8 weeks pregnant and we just found out she has 6 puppies in her by x-ray.  She doesn’t look that big, but I guess they are in there.  Wednesday is the big day.  Wish her good luck and let’s hope all the pups are healthy.  I sneaked in a few pictures of Cinder because she has not been getting enough attention lately too.  See if you can count 6 and possibly 7 pups.

We got a record amount of snow in the Chicago area.  12.9 inches.  It was really fun and even shoveling it wasn’t too bad.  Here is a photo of Ashlee’s car just about buried.  Another little known fact is that there was a 4.2 magnitude earthquake too.  Maybe the weight of all the snow triggered it.  The dogs and Hannah are loving the snow, but it is too deep for everyone except Cinder.

Nick, my cousin, hit the pheasant preserve for his first trip with his new gun.  We took Cinder and Nadia and let them do their thing.  Nick dropped three birds with one shot a piece, pretty impressive since he only made it to the trap range once with his new gun.  After a pretty succesful day, 4 birds and only two fly aways, one of which definitely got hit and was going down, but managed to do so out of our reach.  After a day in the field, we hit the lodge up for some beers.  While we were standing around waiting for the birds to be cleaned we ran into the hunters in the field next to us.  They asked, “Who was shooting the cannon?”  To which I replied, “This guy,” while pointing at Nick.  Quite funny at the time.  We were both shooting the same shells but something about his gun just makes it loud.  Enjoy the photos and our video.

Nick with Nadia and his first pheasant.

Nadia, Cinder, and I spent spent Saturday afternoon hunting pheasant. It was all three of our first time out and it was a lot of fun. I went to a hunt club that is open to public. They released four birds for me into a one acre field planted with what I think is called grain sorghum. It was very thick cover (it thins out by the middle of November), but Nadia and Cinder still managed to find and flush all the birds. We faced a few difficulties; my lack of shooting skill coupled with fact that my dogs are going to flush the pheasant whether I am ready or not, and Nadia couldn’t see over the plants to find the birds, but if I could spot the general area she would go fetch it up for me. We came home with 2 out 4 birds. One got away and another flew over some trees into a neighboring field and went down, but it would have been unsafe to retrieve because there were hunters there too. We had an awesome day though. Invitations are open to all for duck or pheasant.