Oh Yeah, You Blend

Everyone is doing great – Aniston broke a kilo today!

Milk Comas

Beals & Connelly

Esposito, Donnelly & Aniston

They celebrated their two weeks of age by getting dewormed! Nina is now feeding them standing up at least some of the time, they are so big!

Everybody has two eyes now except for holdouts Donnelly and Esposito, who both have two little slivers of eye visible, so they’re getting there. The other three are in full-on Mr. Magoo mode now.

…first, because they will eat whenever there is food available. They push themselves away from the milk bar like overeaters at a buffet, but they’ll cram more in if it’s available if their milk coma is interrupted.

And second, because it was a wee bit chilly here this morning (around 60 F) and they were VERY comfortable. Every time I’ve been worried they were too cold, they were either in the nice loose pile that means “perfect temperature” or spread around the box, which means “too warm”.

(also, they have already made tiny barks! They also make little chirps and buzzes like raccoons. They look more like tiny bears than otters now)

Beals has TWO EYES!

Everybody else has tiny slivers visible, should all open today/tomorrow! So this means minimal artificial lighting for the next couple of days.

And they are HUGE! Weights this morning are:

• Aniston (yellow collar): 883 grams or 1.95 pounds
• Beals (grey collar): 707 grams or 1.56 pounds
• Connelly (blue collar): 730 grams or 1.61 pounds (he is now bigger than both girls! He’s just the smallest boy now)
• Donnelly (orange collar): 818 grams or 1.80 pounds
• Esposito (dark brown collar): 715 grams or 1.58 pounds (she pulled ahead of her sister!)

Nina is getting lots of good food and she is efficiently turning it into good milk!

I had to let everyone’s collars out a bit this morning when I put them back on (they have them off overnight) – first this gives them a break from the collars and lets the hair unflatten. Second, it gets them used to a collar going on and off (they don’t even react to the collars at all now).

Their morning routine (for the next few days, until we’re done with the early neurological stimulation):

• I get up and let Nina out (if Jim is up with the others, they all go out), wet a small towel and put it in the fridge, then go out and play some quick fetch with the dogs
• I make breakfast for the dogs, Tish and Rakki do a sit stay for theirs in the kitchen while I take Nina back to the puppy room with hers. Nina gets Orijen (right now she is getting 3/4 of a cup 4-5 times a day, her normal ration is 1/4-1/3 of a cup twice a day), some canned tripe and a few spoonfuls of fat-free plain yoghurt (fat free because in dairy products, the lower the fat, the higher the calcium – she needs extra calcium because she is lactating and is at risk for eclampsia if she doesn’t get adequate calcium, which is also why I switch her to a low-calcium diet for the last few weeks of pregnancy, and then back to a higher-calcium diet after whelping, and why you should NEVER give supplemental calcium to a pregnant dog, only after proper labor starts)
• I go get the refrigerated wet towel (for the thermal stress part of the early neurological stimulation) and bring it back to the puppy room along with their clean bedding
• puppies get taken out of the whelping box and cuddled one by one and then put in the warming box (which will be swapped out for a pen soon, since they are starting to get very close to being able to climb out)
• I change the bedding in the box
• I take each puppy out one at a time and weigh them, do their early neurological stimulation exercises (tactical stimulation, head up, head down, supine, thermal), put their collars back on, and put them back in the whelping box with Nina (she is usually finished the first half of her breakfast by now and is ready to nurse them) – I try to minimize any additional stimulation around this time. Cuddles come throughout the day.

There it is: thrilling, isn’t it? Tomorrow they will get their first deworming with Pyrantel (2, 4, 6 and 8 weeks). They usually love it, it’s sweet. Pyrantel is a very safe, broad-spectrum dewormer. Even dogs who have been properly maintained on parasite control throughout their lives can still pass worms along to their puppies, since worms have a way of hiding from deworming treatments (called encysting, read more here, if you really want to!).

…getting to go for a proper WALK is AWESOME! (although all that ballast attached to her undercarriage just now must be like someone running with weights!)

BUT!

Having to have a bath afterwards is less so.

(The puppies should have good antibodies from colostrum for quite a while yet, but better safe than sorry.)

OMG, one of the puppies just BARKED! A tiny little “woof”, but it was definitely a dog noise and not a newborn puppy noise! (I know, I know, you’re thinking: Vallhunds? Barking? Surely you jest!)

ALSO! Little stub-tailed girl Beals has a tiny wee sliver of her right eye visible! They will probably all have their eyes open by the weekend! On that note, be prepared for a bit less puppycam in the evenings for a bit, as I don’t mind daylight but I won’t have the room lights on for long stretches of time for the first few days their eyes are open, to give them a chance to adjust to being able to SEE!

They also will get their first deworming this weekend, since they will be 2 weeks old! (every two weeks until they go home)

Puppies are doing great! Last night I took them outside one by one, and it was so amazing to see them realize that they were somewhere new. They were all cuddled in to me until we got outside, and then every single one of them stretched their little necks out and sniffed….sniiiiiffffffffed. You could tell their brains were working hard analyzing the new information. No open eyes yet…

Weights this morning:

• Aniston AKA Hulk (yellow collar) 755 grams (1.66 pounds)
• Beals (gray collar) 608 grams (1.34 pounds)
• Connelly (blue collar) 616 grams (1.36 pounds)
• Donnelly AKA Trainee Hulk (orange collar) 692 grams (1.53 pounds)
• Esposito (dark brown collar) 620 grams (1.37 pounds)

Nina is eating like a horse to keep up with these monsters.

They sometimes segregate themselves, sometimes the two girls are off by themselves while the boys have their own GROSS (“Get Rid Of Slimy girlS”) club like Calvin, other times they’re in twos, and still other times:

B Litter – 11 days old

The collars are GERMAN and have a great long name in GERMAN! They are also in HORRIBLE colors, which I guess means you don’t prefer one puppy over another because of its collar color. I hope they show up okay on the puppycam!

Anyway, the color coding is as follows (these are horrible webcam shots so this is mostly how they will look actually on the webcam):

Aniston – yellow collar

Beals – gray collar

Connelly – blue collar

Donnelly – orange collar

Esposito – dark brown collar

The boys’ collar colors spell “BOY” (blue, orange, yellow). The girls’ collar colors…are gray and dark brown! Yes, there was a pink collar, but I opted to have them all be equally awful, so I didn’t use it. Plus I thought the pink might look too much like one of the other colors on the cam.

The puppies are just so adorable. They pretty much all relax right into your arms when you pick them up, especially if they’ve just eaten and are in a milk coma. They sniff around with little grunty sounds and try to nurse on your chin, and you can lie them down on their backs along your arm and tickle their tummies and they lie there and flop their tiny bear paws at you.  They are SO CUTE. They are also starting to sound like dogs, one howled yesterday and I swear one just barked (getting a head start!).

On a more serious note, I am liking how adaptable they seem to be, they sometimes squeak when you pick them up if you don’t scritch them a bit first so they know you’re there, I expect this will stop once their eyes are open and they can see well (for the first few days they are Mr Magoo, squinting at everything), but once they know it’s a person and not a monster, they settle right down. They will sleep on us if we hold them long enough. The bottle feeding really seems to be helping, what a great idea that is!

I have booked their CERF eye exams with Dr Burgesser at Veterinary Specialists of Rochester for September 26, they will be 7 1/2 weeks old. They will start leaving for their new homes just a few days later…