Oh Yeah, You Blend

Finally, video from Monday’s litter swim at Canine Splash:

Jan is here and helped with pictures. Temperament tests were done today and overall were very good, everybody retrieved!

Lobo (formerly Aniston)

Lobo (formerly Aniston)

Beals

Beals

Connelly

Connelly

Donnelly

Donnelly

Esposito

Esposito

Weights at 6 weeks:

• Aniston (yellow collar): 2606 grams or 5.75 pounds
• Beals (gray collar): 1980 grams or 4.37 pounds
• Connelly (blue collar): 2160 grams or 4.76 pounds
• Donnelly (orange collar): 2300 grams or 5.07 pounds
• Esposito (dark brown collar): 2346 grams or 5.17 pounds

Individual pictures (much less squirmy as long as your temporary name isn’t Connelly…). I also seem to be wearing my 2009 National Specialty shirt again…:

Aniston

Aniston

Beals

Beals

Connelly

Connelly

Donnelly

Donnelly

Esposito

Esposito

(does what it says on the tin)

The puppies celebrated being one day shy of six weeks old by attacking and devouring their first hard-boiled egg. Blue collar boy Connelly play bowed at it.

Final score: Puppies 1 – Egg 0

The puppies had more visitors today: Riley’s people Nichole and Chris! They LOVE visitors! Chris wants to install a “wake up the puppies” button on the webcam, I told him he could do that at HIS house…

I was thinking about how many people the puppies have met so far, they’re at at least 18 people plus us! Not bad for less than six weeks.

They turn six weeks old on Sunday! Their second-last deworming while they are here…it’s gone so quickly this time! Their personalities are really coming out, although I remind myself how much change there was in the last ones between five weeks and the time they went home.

They are really noticeably building their muscles and stamina – they need more and more time to zoom around and spend less time sleeping (although they are still babies and do sleep a lot). They get straight kibble for one or two meals a day now, and I got them some sweet potato chews to try, they’ll get those tomorrow!

Since I posted about the routine back when the puppies were wee, I’ll tell you how things are done now:

• get up, let big dogs out
• clean up the worst of the puppy poop while they’re out
• take last night’s load of puppy bedding out of dryer and move the puppy bedding out of washer into dryer
• let big dogs in and let Nina in to puppy pen to feed them and satisfy herself that they all survived the night without her
• while Nina is nursing, measure out food into blender and big dogs’ bowls, add warm water to puppies’ food
• get big dogs’ breakfast ready (add fish oil, spoonful of tripe, etc.), add tripe to puppies’ food and blend it up (the blending is getting less and less now and soon they will be on straight kibble or Honest Kitchen)
• feed big dogs once Nina is done nursing and has been let out of pen
• feed puppies (I call them with “pup-pup-pup” when I feed them, so they start learning to come when called)
• let big dogs outside again, let puppies out to run around and play and eat Jim’s feet (Jim plays with them while I clean the pen, a tough job but someone’s got to do it)
• remove all bedding from puppy pen and replace it (there is underpadding of recycled hospital pads, and then towels and bathmats over that)
• remove turf and take into bathroom to wash, get last night’s turf which has been drying
• throw out pee pad underneath turf and wash pan, replace with fresh pee pad and clean turf
• remove underpad from turf area and replace with clean one
• when puppies are finished playing, each one gets an individual cuddle and its collar put back on, then they go back in the pen with any leftover breakfast
• start the washer with the dirty bedding
• have coffee, start webcam, get ready for work

And then that gets repeated at lunchtime (sometimes I just change the top bedding if it’s relatively clean), and dinnertime. Right now it’s about 2 hours of just puppy care per day, not counting playtime and enrichment activities like taking them outside, time spent clicker training, Dremeling nails, handling, teaching them to play with people, etc…THAT is the fun part!

The puppies now have a crate. Par for the course, they think it’s a chew toy…

They ate the first part of their lunch outside today, until I noticed that some wasps were also interested in tripe and puppy mush, so they finished their lunch indoors!

We happened to catch this moment of cuteness with Jim’s phone. Donnelly trying very hard to get his mum to play with him while she was busy nursing the others and cleaning up poopidue (that’s what’s left over after we clean up the poop for her!). He already has great ear biting skill!

They are ROWDY just now, running around in the box and wrestling!