December 23rd Puppy Envy

The dark spot at the bottom of the photo is Moon's nose, she wanted to sniff the camera.


Poor Freya. She's so tired of being mommy and wants to be a puppy again. She plays and plays with me and with Samantha's puppies, trying to regain her own puppiness. I have to keep reminding her that she is bigger than the 5 week old pups, and needs to take it easy with them. She hasn't hurt any of them yet, but she has scared them quite a bit, and I don't want it to get out of hand. She plays with her own puppies, but much more gently. One thing good has come out of all this, is that her shyness seems to have completely disappeared for the duration. I hope she stays as social and friendly once the pups are totally weaned. They eat mostly moistened or dry puppy food, but still nurse as much as they can from Freya who doesn't want to nurse them much at all.

Samantha rarely nurses her pups, and is almost done with it. They subsist almost entirely on puppy food and puppy formula. They are fat and happy though, and are doing fine. They will be 6 weeks old today and are full of run and energy. They are so fun to watch, not so fun to be chewed on by, but fun to play tug-o-war with old socks, rope toys, etc. For the most part Samantha's pups play well with Freya's, except Xena, who still needs to be reminded to take it easy.

Demon is great with the pups, but also needs to be reminded once in a while to take it easy. Yukon still runs away from them. Samantha will play a little bit with them, but not much. She still cleans up after them occasionally, but not often. That job has fallen to me.

The puppies got to pig out this morning. First, they ate all of the moistened food, so I filled a regular food bowl half with milk and mixed in puppy formula. They drank that dry, so I opened a can of puppy food for them. They devoured that until their bellies hung so low they had trouble walking (okay I exaggerate, but they were rather rolly polly). Samantha's pups got to have an outing in my room and played for an hour before conking out. Freya got to spend that time in the kitchen eating up the rest of the canned food. I let her out, and put Samantha's puppies back in the kitchen after cleanup and before my shower. They were for the most part, unconscious when I left for work except for Squeaker who was out in a dog igloo with Demon. I got James up and told him where Squeaker was before heading out the door.