39 Days?! Wow, time flies.
Sorry for the lack of blog updates. Our blogger in chief has been under the weather this week.
The pups are doing great. Lots of small news updates and some “ok” pictures.
All C Litter pics have been taken with a Galaxy S4 phone, but we DO have a good camera here, so we’ll start snapping some better pics in the very near future.
On to the puppy updates!
The first update is that for every day in the last week we have had almost no puppy poo in here at all. We take them out 4 times each day. First thing in the AM, right around noon, in the afternoon, and again around midnight. Until we raised a litter I really had no idea but they DO have a strong desire to keep their area clean. They do not want to go to the bathroom in the house. After seeing this I’d probably never punish a dog for going potty in the house. Proactively getting them outdoors to a safe place and rewarding them when they do good is all that it takes. I haven’t been rewarding them other than hanging out with them outside- we’ll leave most all of this other than verbal praise to their new owners.
It has been raining here- Friday it rained the entire day. The pups go out 4x/day regardless of weather. They do not seem to even notice that it is raining out. This is very good news. I have discovered that they do not like the cold.
Aura has still been jumping in and letting the pups feed here and there- usually once or twice a day for a few minutes. She is back to 100% adult dog food. She is definitely producing a whole lot less milk than she was 2 weeks ago. I’m not quite sure what the point is now but her instincts are so good I know there must be a reason behind it. Maybe she just needs the little remaining milk removed to prevent mastitis, but it probably benefits the pups somehow too. Not all of the pups swarm her any more- the first 2 or 3 pups get some milk and the others no longer freak out trying to get some milk, in fact, sometimes they just yawn!
Occasionally we’ll take 1 puppy out at a time and let them wander around the house. This one found mom and decided that lying on the cool tile floor like mom was doing looked like a good idea:
Here are all the pups eating in a light rain on 01/23/2015:
I did not get a picture but this week they did meet our cat “Baby Girl”. Instead of a pic of the puppies with them we just have this pic of Baby Girl taking a catnap.
The meeting was uneventful. Baby Girl was wondering what was going on. 6 puppies almost her size were sniffing her. They lost interest and she walked away and leaped over the fence after a few seconds. It was a very good first intro. When the weather cooperates we’ll bring her back in with maybe 1 or 2 pups at a time and maybe she’ll stay around longer.
01/24/2015 The pups have been virtually untouched by any “outsiders” until today. We had a friend over who has a 2yr old who has 3 dogs at home. He reached in and pet the pups. Aura is still protective but is no longer a “bear with her cubs”.