Buddy & Ruby, (sitting in a tree ?), K-I-S-S-I-N-G!

I thought it would be so easy to breed a dog.  Their instincts, fueled by mother nature, would take over and ta-da - we'd have puppies on the way, right??  Wrong, as it turns out.  First off we thought we'd missed the window of opportunity because our girl Ruby was already having her period which for us humans means the egg's time has run out.  Turns out this is NOT the case in the canine's world.  Actually the spotting of red blood indicates that it's not quite time yet and we needed to watch carefully for the color of the blood to change to light pink.  Supposedly, according to information obtained via the almighty 'google' search engine, when the color of the female's blood changes, then the magical time has arrived.  So we still had time and thus began our search for a compatable puppy Daddy.  We happened upon a family here in Anchorage, who like us, are in love with their Labrador and wanted to have one of his puppies to add to their family.  We set up a time to meet and it turned out that Buddy and Ruby REALLY liked one another - big surprise.  Buddy and Ruby both, ironically, weighed 72 lbs., another sure sign of destiny at work.  Buddy is a beautiful butterscotch color and with Labradors the puppies will be born in solid colors, not spotty, so it's o.k. to mix and match colors.  We were happy about this because Ruby is from a golden mom and a black dad so her and Buddy's puppies would hopefully be a mix of golden and black.  Yea - we have found our future 'puppy Daddy' so this sounds like an open/shut deal right?  Wrong again.  Both of our sweet (a.k.a, innocent & virgin) Labs had no 'experience' at this kind of courtship.  On their first 'date' they chased and played and resorted to an exorbitant amount of sniffing and licking - but no actual 'togetherness'.  Nuff said.  Date number two was a repeat of their first, but this time we went to Buddy's house and had the dogs in a more confined space in Buddy's garage.  On their third meeting, Buddy's owner Darla, noticed that Buddy seemed distracted by her presence so she left the garage.  Right away Buddy started paying attention to me in Darla's absence.  So I left the garage as well.  Thankfully Darla's two son's were available to stay and supervise the dogs and, like magic, once the garage was cleared of all other females,  Buddy and Ruby got down to business and formed the sought after 'tie'.  Buddy instinctively knew he was locked-in to Ruby and didn't struggle, (smart boy).  Ruby however, wanted no part in waiting around so we had to hold her and keep her calm.  This is why breeding dogs should always be supervised - there are actually 'safety' issues - who knew??  Success at last!  Two days later we got them together again, this time Darla and I enlisted our husbands to help supervise (as all the females were staying out of the garage now that we figured out the magical formula) and success again!  Two or three 'ties' are recommended to insure fertilization of the female.  Now we were pretty sure that puppies would be on the way and as an added bonus, all the time we spent 'trying' with Ruby and Buddy was not in vain.  We were able to get to know Buddy and his whole family a little better, which was a blessing.   The more time we spent with their family the more we were happy that we found them specifically.  Buddy also charmed his way into our hearts and we were more excited than ever to see how their puppies would turn out.  Now we just wait and see . . . . .  and keep our fingers, and Ruby's paws, crossed (literally) as we didn't want her to meet any other males which could cause disaster to all our plans so Ruby's freedom had to be curtailed in a big way, at least for a while.