Oh Yeah, You Blend

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!).

This entry was posted on Saturday, August 18th, 2012 at 10:40 AM and is filed under 2012 litter, breeding, dogs, Nina, puppies, vallhunds. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.