Jon,
You have put in a lot of good work and built a very nice site. It would be a shame to have it marred by errors in spelling and grammar. I quickly noticed about a dozen spelling errors spread throughout the site (two in the menu items alone and one in the calendar, on July 6). I'm not a great speller myself, so there are likely to be more. If I were you, I'd correct them as soon as possible. Believe me, it's important for the general impression of the site! I like your personal, direct style of writing, so I certainly would not change that, but the errors is a different story...
The reason I asked about the definition of "hits" in your case, is that the site stats tend to report a number of different quantities, such as "visitors", "page views", "files accessed", etc.. If "hits" refer to "files accessed", which often is the case, a single visit could easily represent 40, 50 or more "hits". Just to be aware...
Either way, I'm sure "5441 hits in 16 days" is a good record for a new site! (AND you can add Moz to your list of Ja, Au, US, CA,...

)
Again, congratulations on a good-looking site with a lot of worthwhile content, - and good luck with the puppy sales!
(Out of curiosity, what does "high degree of ticking" refer to?)