It’s Movie Time!
Bunny’s puppies turn three weeks old tomorrow, so I decided to celebrate with a movie.
Embedded below, or full sized on Blip.
Oodles of new French Bulldog puppy photos…
Not much time for writing, but I did take some new photos —
Here’s my favorite photo – it’s Bunny with her kids. I swear, they’re all almost as large as she is. Mind you, Bunny is on the small size – and those are some mighty chunky puppies!
You can check out the slide shows below, or see the images full sized over on Flickr.
Bunny Pups Birthday, and Delilah is Slightly Better
The Bunny pups turn two weeks old today, and I have to say that they are one of the most stress free litters I’ve ever had (thanks mostly to Bunny’s exceptional mothering skills). They rarely cry, and they’re all unbelievably chubby little babies. Bunny keeps them immaculately clean, and rarely is out of the whelping box. Every litter should be this easy.
Delilah, on the other, is a graduate of the same slacker mom school of parenthood that her sister Penelope attended. She is getting better – she has some milk, finally, although not very much, and she’s occasionally cleaning the puppies, but over all her attitude is one of “this is all a bad dream”. Hauling the puppies to Bunny for feedings was starting to stress Bun out – she became agitated every time I took them back away from again, barking and jumping up and down in a way that clearly said “Where do you think you’re going with those babies?”. We were faced with a choice – either leave the puppies with Bunny for good, or start supplementing with a bottle. The size difference between the Bunny pups and Delilah’s wee babies would have made it risky to leave them with Bunny, so we chose bottle feeding. Thankfully, the bottle is just there to ‘top them up’ after they’ve nursed, so it’s a little less onerous than a full regimen of bottle feeding four puppies would usually be.
We’re still getting up every two hours for feedings, but now the routine is –
- Get up, put Delilah on bed, get puppies, put on bed with Delilah
- Put Delilah on her side (she’s still not thrilled with this, but it no longer requires wrestling moves to get her into position)
- Put puppies on nipples, making sure the smaller ones (the two brindle girls) get the premium real estate
- When pups drop off, top pups up with a bottle feeding. Each puppy drinks about 10 ml of formula, which doesn’t sound like much, but is making all the difference in their weight gain, and yet is still little enough to not impact Delilah’s milk production
- Clean puppy bottoms, trying first to get Delilah to lick them, and then, if that fails, using cotton balls dipped in warm water
- Put pups back in whelping box, feed Delilah, let her outside to pee, stagger back to bed
.. repeat in two hours. With any luck, Delilah’s motherhood skills will increase over the next week, so that I can start getting some real sleep, instead of just running on coffee and adrenaline. In the meantime, kissing Vela’s fat little tummy is a remarkable pick me up.
The rest of the photos are over here on Flickr.
The Joys of Being a Dog Breeder
First off, I’m bone tired, so if this post makes little to no sense try to bear with me..
Delilah finally got a wee bit of colostrum at about 2 am last night. The operative term here is ‘little’ – the most minuscule droplets I’ve ever seen out of a bitch. Not nearly enough to nourish the pups, but at least they did get a little bit from her, which is important for their immune systems.
Since I happen to have another nursing bitch in the house, I’ve so far avoided having to bottle feed the pups to help them out. I’m not sure, however, that bottle feeding wouldn’t possibly be easier. Here’s our current routine:
Get pups, put on the bed. Grab Delilah, put on bed next to pups, wrestle her onto her side (I’m not kidding about this, either – you have to physically wrestle her down onto her side, then pin her there so she can’t bolt for the door).
Put pups on nipples and let them at least try to nurse, as their suckling will help Delilah’s milk to come down. There’s a fine line here, however, because if they try to nurse too hard, for too long, they’ll exhaust themselves and give up. So, as soon as they start to get restless, I remove them, pack them in a basket, and haul them down to Bunny’s room.
Once there, I grab whichever one of Bun’s pups is awake, then grab Bunny, and put them both on the bed. Once the Bunny pup is nursing, I sneak Delilah’s pups in as well. Bunny isn’t thrilled about this arrangement, but she’s being very tolerant. So long as one of her own pups is nursing, she’ll lie still long enough for Delilah’s pups to top up.
I then wipe bottoms, pack them back into their basket, put Bunny and her puppy back into the whelping box, and take Delilah’s pups back up to Delilah’s room.
Repeat every two hours. Whee, dog breeding sure is fun.
First photos of Delilah’s pups (who we’ve been referring to as the Deedle Bops, which should be proof enough of how sleep deprived both Sean and I are) —
http://www.flickr.com/photos/frenchbulldogs/sets/72157619967869982/
Twelve day photos of Bunny’s pups, who are all FAT as can be and finally have open eyes. They are the cutest, chubbiest little monkeys you can imagine, and it’s impossible to see them and not want to pick them up and blow raspberries on their tummies.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/frenchbulldogs/sets/72157619883408409/
Delilah Babies Make Their Debut
Delilah went into labor underneath my desk this afternoon – thankfully, our vet’s office is right around the corner from my office. She delivered four lovely babies (yes, just four – and guess what we discovered? Most of that weight wasn’t puppy weight, it was “My mom and dad have been feeding me four meals a day plus snacks” weight). Three girls – two stripey brindles with black masks and one perfectly marked brindle pied, and one boy who is marked JUST like Dexter, right down to that mark on the back of his neck that Barb calls the “devil mark”. Uh oh…
Delilah is doing well, but she has NO MILK. I don’t mean ‘she doesn’t have much milk’, I mean she has NONE. We’ve given her multiple doses of oxy, some drug that encourages smooth muscle contractions, warm compresses, accupuncture – nada. Thankfully, Bunny has been willing to nurse the kids, although so far she won’t clean them. Delilah wants nothing to do with them – I believe I heard her muttering “hire me a freakin’ nanny” as I was shuttling them out of her room and back downstairs to Bunny. Hopefully her hormones will kick in and stimulate her milk production. If not, well, I suppose I can muddle by for a week and wean the Bun pups early.
No photos right now – I’m simply exhausted, and will have to put them alternately on Bunny and then Delilah every two hours for the forseeable future. Whee.