The wee ones had a pretty good night. I slept a little beside them but with the weather fronts coming and going, my sinuses weren't too happy. We did have several bouts of rain and thunder so the pupsters expereinced more of that. They seemed oblivious.
They did very well in the night about potty time - we have a few carpet grade poops in the potty area, too. Not bad for puppies still on a liquid diet.
We've noticed a 'pattern' in their sleep/playtime schedule. The BIG awake/playtime seems to be around noon. They have several smaller sessions where they wrestle around a little/play hungry hungry hippo/chew on each other but that's the one where they are almost all awake and BUSY for a little while. So in the naptime before that, I put that day's new envirmonmental stimulants in the pen.
Today it's the PVC cube/adventure thing. I tired to put it in an area where it can be passive (they hear the noise, the dangling items touch them as the walk through, etc.) or interactive (they mouth/paw at the items. For an extra lure, I put one of the MamaMila approved ropes in the middle.
The pupsters did not disaapoint. Tamara was in with them while I tried to take notes for this ;-). She tried to take pictures but there was also a lot of attempting to encourage pottying in the preferred area. That's mostly only possible when they first wake up because they just don't have that much notice that they are about to need to pee. We can't constantly interrupt their adventuring every time someone gives a potential potty sniff or sit (hard to tell a sit from a squat at this age) or it rather defeats the purpose of the environmental enrichment. So you we get what we get and really praise attempts to get to the potty area.
Things puppies did (names are withheld to protect the guilty - and also because it is pretty hard to tell which is which now that the hair keeps covering the collars. As teeth come in, they will probably all be streaking most of the time anyway so nobody gets their jaw caught in another puppies collar. I have made these collars in such a way that they can't inadvertently be tightened but they don't loosen from everywhere either (you can't really have both):
Mouthed at the pvc 'organ pipes' (random length - do you know how hard my OCD wants to make me put them in ascending or descending order?)
Knocked into the empty water bucket with the loose carabiner (for extra noise - because we didn't already have enough. I think I might start wearing ear protection)
Chewed on the rope - they've been very interested in rope (large and small) today
Played with the bait rope in the middle - including picking it up and trying to give a little kill shake
Pulled/knocked down one of the small metal pie pans.
Wrestled at Tamara's feet
Played with the paint brushes
Knocked at the carabiner on the empty metal bucket with paws
played with the stool
I need to remember to hang a piece of fabric from it one of these days. I think tomorrow I may put the TotoFit equipment and my home rigged table in the center of the cube. (I have horrified visions of puppies using the added height to vault up onto the top rails of the cube - pretty certain they aren't big enough for that quite yet but eventually...)
Weight watchers is slightly less dramatic since the scale only weighs in increments of 2/10ths of a lbs but they range from 4.6lbs to 5.4lbs and are pretty much a bell curve distribution.
Mama Mila is producing more than the pupsters are consuming so I need to do some cleaning tonight. I guess that's what happens when you use Moo as one of her nicknames ;-)
Puppy breath to all! Niighty, Nighty, Nighty
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