This page, as with the litter itself, is work in progress and will be updated regularly with photos and news, however we are also writing a blog about it and it can be seen here

If you follow us on social media or own a Lumikoira pup, you will know that we like to theme our litters, and this 2024 litter will be no different. We always knew that this would be a "Kiva" litter, and would be one to honour her and remember her - because without Kiva this litter would never have come to be.

Louise has come up with some lovely couplets incorporating Kiva, a few of them are "Kiva's Memory" "Kiva's Whisper" "Kiva's Joy" "Kiva's Love", etc. A kennel is only allowed to registered name of 24 letters or less - and Finnish being the complicated language it is it may make it difficult to come up with suitable translatable names. But hey, that's the least of our worries as right now we are concentrating on raising a healthy and well socialised litter.

Come back soon for more news and photos.

We needed to theme the litter, as we always do, and the only group of 3 males and 3 females we could come up with was the characters in Friends, so Chandler, Ross, Rachel. Phoebe and Joey they would be.

Unfortunately things didn't go that well overnight as Kassi was sick a number of times and then developed a case of the runs - this meant that the pups weren't able to get the essential early hours nourishment they is needed. We were able to get Kassi seen to by our vet and as a result of this Kassi began to produce more milk on the Sunday and the pups began to thrive - well 5 of them did.

Sadly Phoebe wasn't doing as well as her siblings and despite our best endeavours she slipped away on Wednesday, she was just 6 days old :-( she was joined on Saturday by her sister Monica who, like Phoebe, was too weak to survive, she was just 9 days old :-(

Nature can be cruel at times.

I'll be adding to this page regularly, the next update will have individual photos of the pips showing their colours, markings and heads (complete with open eyes).

One of the reasons that I've been avoiding updating this page (as of 24/6/25) is because the memory of losing two of the litter is still very raw, yes over 14 months later. However I can report that the litter has done superbly in the 12 months since joining their new families. We retained the Friends theme until we knew which pup would be going to which family and what their pet names would be, and with that info we then referred to each pup by its name to be.

Lumikoira Kiva's Kaiku

The first born was originally called Ross, but when we knew he would be going to Adam and Natalie in Winchester he became Loki, joining their other Lappy Lyra.

Lumikoira Kiva's Armas

Chandler, and subsequently named Ralf, was always the largest of the litter (though at his most recent weigh in he has stopped growing and is a healthy 16.8kg) went to live in Suffolk with Lynn and Tim and their older Lappy Sprocket in Suffolk, bizarrely in the same town where Mylo, our first Lappy, was born.

Lumikoira Kiva's Ilola

The surviving girl, Rachel, went to live with Charlotte and Wes in Aylesbury. Charlotte got the showing bug and has shown Nolla a number of times qualifying for Crufts 2025 (finishing 4th in the class) and for Crufts 2026 with her regular top 3 placings.

Lumikoira Kiva's Valo

Joey had a number of names before leaving us including Tippex Head (the Tippex identifier we use stubbornly refused to come off) before heading off with a long term friends Alex and Sara and family to live his new life as Obi (the family are huge Star Wars fans). Louise and I have to refer to him as Obi-Tuu as his brother from Kassi's previous litter is also called Obi.Obi has filled a huge hole left by Zomba their first Lappy who passed away due to old age a few months before the litter was born.

As with the other pups born at Lumikoira there will be individual pages with words from their owners and a selection of photos of them.

Raising the litter was  an interesting 8 weeks as when the pups were 5 weeks old our second 2024 litter was born (Tiia's Kahvi litter). In reality having 2 litters overlapping wasn't as difficult as we had anticipated, the mums (Kassi and Tiia) helped each other out with looking after the pups and the [pups for the last couple of weeks were busy entertaining themselves and playing with each other.

A number of people think that we were mad to put ourselves through it all, and there have been times when I have agreed with them - 12 weeks of waking at 5 o'clock did get a bit tiring - however a year later and I have no regrets, in fact I'm tempted to do it again, after all 12 weeks of raising puppies in one hit is easier than having to do 8 weeks twice!

General Litter Shots
Random shots and in no particular order