September 17, 2012 Pupdate

               Good morning,  good morning the little dogs say.  Actually, that’s a very loose translation of what is more likely “feed our mama so she can keep feeding us, please.”  We did 4 hour shifts around the whelping box last night so everybody could get some sleep.  SammieDoodlebug actually started really resting a little during the night.  She must be exhausted but she’s doing a great job.

               Since I got to sleep the early shift last night, I took Jack and Jill up to my bed.  When I got up at 2 to relieve Cindi, they didn’t even get up.  She took them in to sleep with her but when I went up to get my water bottle a few minutes later, Jack was at the baby gate so I took him down to walk the plank.  When we came back in, he went right back up to my bed and stayed there until I came back up at 6:30.  Jill had taken up the other half of dog Cindi’s bed and wasn’t going to let him in anyway. 

               As is my wont, I rearranged everything again.  I put the dog bed couch behind the pool against the wall so I could pet her and easily reach over her to the puppies.  When I was on the air mattress in front of the box, it was harder to reach.  I am not a big fan of air mattresses anyway. I need to find someone to make my leather covered twin size mattress bench.  The leather covered might be the hard part, I can explain the rest of what I want but it never seems urgent until we have puppies and then I am too busy and then we don’t  have puppies for a while and it’s just a vicious cycle.  But, hey, it may be the only recorded instance of me being patient about anything.

               I tried to do a mini- weight watchers meeting this morning of the 2 smaller puppies and they appeared to have regained to their birth weight or day after.  The problem with weighing puppies on a talking kitchen scale is that they wriggle around a lot and skew the results.  So I am now borrowing a baby scale from our friend Marta (SammieDoodlebug and I nannied a litter of golden puppies for her a few years ago) and I will use my handy, dandy Iffen (for anyone who doesn’t know me already, my screen readers pronounce iPhone as Iffen so that became its call name) to take pictures for sighted people to translate – unless one of the really cool scanning apps will do it, they have them for money after all.  Dog friends are some of the best people, I don’t know how I would do it without all of them since Bruce’s golf events went into overdrive this year and he isn’t home to do night duty and drive us around this week.  Between Dog Cindi (for the anyone new, that is a term of endearment to distinguish her from my cousin Cindy,) Debbie (she is keeping Indy and Bela while Dog Cindi is here), Marta (loaning us her puppy scale,) Colleen (taking pictures) and everyone else we call upon in our moments of need, we may have everything covered.  It’s all about the dogs here.

               Since last night, we’ve made a concerted effort to make sure the smaller ones get a good spot at the milk bar and don’t get pushed off until they have eaten well.  I may supplement the puppies but haven’t yet.  I made up some formula last night but only Doodlebug was willing to consume it.  Maybe I’ll try the trick people use for tube feeding and put a little Karo on the nipple to make it more palatable.

They are all strong little puppers but it is especially noticeable how strong the blue and orange boys and the red girl are.  They have no trouble getting across the pool and forcing their way in to a spot no matter who or what is in the way.  And you can feel their strength when you hold them (unless they are snoozing.)  It’s amazing to me how well they do without vision or hearing and how SammieDoodlebug knows who needs help getting there and when they need to move around .

               We mixed up some supplement to bottle feed them a little just in case but after tonight’s weight watchers meeting it was clearly unnecessary.  We gave it to a few of the puppies just to get our skills honed and see which nipple would work.  Once we got the nipple unclogged, they went at it like gangbusters.  I have it in the refrigerator just in case we need it, though.

               I had to loosen every puppy’s collar tonight, another good sign they are gaining weight.  2 boys are over a pound and 2 of the girls were within half an ounce so I figure they will hit it soon if they haven’t already. In fun with numbers, we have gained almost a pound and a half of puppy.

               It’s time to do puppy yoga and then go nighty, nighty, nighty.