Oh Yeah, You Blend

The puppies are zooming along as they grow! Yesterday Austin‘s mom Lisa came to visit, they were very happy to meet her and chewed on her toes and fingers and ears and anything else they could reach (their teeth are almost all the way in now, including their FANGS). Nina was very relaxed about it, although Tish and Rakki cried pitifully that they weren’t allowed in to visit with her (even though she’d spent quite a while visiting with them earlier).

Weigh-ins (it is getting harder to weigh them accurately since they are SO active, so these are ballparks):

• Austin (yellow): 1485 grams or 3.27 pounds
• Beals (gray): 1165 grams or 2.57 pounds
• Connelly (blue): 1209 grams or 2.67 pounds
• Donnelly (orange): 1310 grams or 2.89 pounds
• Esposito (dark brown): 1315 grams or 2.9 pounds

And this morning Connelly (blue collar) escaped out of the puppy ROOM! I’d let them out of the pen to play while I cleaned the box, and I heard Rakki and Tish barking, I turned around and little blue collar boy had squished himself through the baby gate and was happily toddling off into the wild blue yonder living room! Tish was ecstatically play bowing at him and trying to get him to zoom with her, Rakki was tattling on him. STINKER! They are getting close to climbing out of the box even with the big wall up, so I think the next step is going to be moving the big pen in here, it has higher walls and also a lip at the top to help prevent escapes. I feel like a prison warden here!

I fed them a breakfast (gotta eat a breakfast Margie!) today, and they will get a dinner too.

Also: we have an AKC litter registration number!

Yesterday my dear friend and breed mentor Ulla Gamberg had to say goodbye to one of her best friends. Nina and Rakki‘s father, BISS Ch. Vastgota Birk, passed away yesterday at the grand age of 16 years and 4 months. Less than two weeks ago he relived his show dog glory days at the Swedish Vallhund Club of Canada’s National Specialty – Ulla says he went into the ring for Veteran Sweeps and got his happy face on and gaited around the ring like he owned it, like he always used to. He was so happy, people cheered, the judge cried. Goodbye Birk, you special, wonderful, kind dog. Once in a while a dog comes along who has that special, indefinable quality – Birk had that, and passed it along to some of his puppies. My beloved Nina, his daughter, has it and I am blessed to have her, Birk’s legacy will live on.

On to fun puppy happenings:

So the puppies have been getting free “bomble time” (as we call it) in the puppy room (outside the pen) for the last day. They LOVE it, all kinds of new surfaces to walk on (tile in the bathroom, carpet in the bedroom, marble between the two), they can go under the bed (I’m looking at you, Esposito…), they can check out Nina’s food and water bowls (both girls are very interested in this), they can play with their toys, then can really stretch their (tiny little) legs, they can interact with Tish and Rakki through the baby gate, and try to go THROUGH the baby gate (I’m looking at you, Donnelly), they can try to wrestle the shower curtain down (also Donnelly). They can climb on laps (Connelly is already a lap dog), they can chew on ankles (Aniston, the biggest of all, is concerned he may starve at any moment) – they have TEETH now…poor Nina! They are WIPED out after a good session of marching around exploring, which is why the puppycam is probably a bit boring sometimes just now!

And Nina is happy that she can PLAY with them now that they are little dogs instead of just puppies:

It always happens…this time we noticed Tish was staring into the puppy room instead of going outside (and Tish LOVES outside, she would almost be an outside dog if I let her). Sure enough, Beals had organized an escape! Jim devised a clever method of raising the lower wall in the pen (so Nina can get in and out, but the puppies stay in) – we’ve been adding doweling underneath the rounded-off wall to raise it by small increments. We added another one this morning!

We knew they were getting close, since all of them have been able to pull themselves partway over, but little Beals made it all the way out and was exploring the room. It will be time for the big pen very soon now.

I am now putting them in the bathroom when I change them, since the warming box is no match for their mighty escape abilities! The bathroom is interesting, different surfaces to walk on!

The puppies ate their first real food today to celebrate being three weeks old. It was ground-up puppy food (Orijen), goat’s milk Esbilac and minced tripe. It smelled horrible to humans and irresistible to dogs (Nina, Rakki and Tish were sitting by the baby gate crying and barking and sniffing as hard as they could).

Here is nearly four minutes of puppies eating real food for the first time (they are completely crashed out now, full tummies will do that!):

They are three weeks old today (already!). They have some different toys to play with, and they woke me up at 4 AM being complete hooligans, barking at each other, crashing into things, growling…

Weights today (they are all over a kilogram today. Beals was the last to break a kilo, but she did so today with a bullet! She was the smallest gainer yesterday, weighing in at only 986 grams, and the biggest gainer today):

• Aniston (yellow collar): 1242 grams or 2.74 pounds
• Beals (gray collar): 1041 grams or 2.3 pounds
• Connelly (blue collar): 1036 grams or 2.28 pounds
• Donnelly (orange collar): 1185 grams or 2.61 pounds
• Esposito (dark brown collar): 1097 grams or 2.42 pounds

Connelly is back to being the lightest today, but he was heavier than Beals yesterday.  He’ll get some extra today. He’s active and thriving, just little. It does tend to even out over time, but I like to make sure nobody falls too far behind, so what I tend to see is the slow gainers become the big gainers and the big gainers slow down.

They will get their first real food later on today! Video will be taken!

I cannot believe they are 20 days old already! Three weeks tomorrow!

Their microchips have arrived from Canada (I use the CKC-approved ISO chips). They won’t actually get implanted until they’re 7 weeks old (Stephanie does it for me and she gives them a buffered local anesthetic so they don’t feel it, it’s a huge needle!), but they’re here and ready!

I sent in their litter registration to the AKC last week, I haven’t done a frozen semen breeding registration before so I wanted to make sure it got there nice and early in case there are hold ups.

Finally, here is your dose of cute for today, Beals and Aniston playing with each other, then trying to wake up their brother Connelly to play at the end:

I Dremeled everybody’s nails tonight for the first time. The puppies are remarkably bigger and their nails are sharp, Nina got a scratch on her eyelid from one of them, and since they all have their eyes open now (therefore at risk for scratching each other) and their nails have hardened up…I figured it was time to introduce the Dremel. I’ve clipped their nails several times, but that still leaves a sharp edge, plus the earlier you start things, the sooner they get used to them.

I was VERY pleasantly surprised. I did their nails at feeding time (Nina had just finished nursing them so they were all in milk comas, and I was topping them up with the bottle of formula). The boys were uniformly awesome, they all just nursed on my fingers and were very mellow about the monster buzzing their feet, they seemed to care more about being moved around than the Dremeling. The girls had more of an opinion about it, but were really also pretty good – some squeaking and token attempts to escape, but the bottle o’formula had mighty power and they decided that if there was FOOD involved, it couldn’t be all that bad.