Mz. P decided she didn’t want to wait, and presented us with five pups — 3 cream girls, a cream boy, and a black masked fawn boy who can scream down walls. All of them are huuuuge — the largest weighs 12.4 ounces. By comparison, Heart weighed 9.1 at birth.
Photos now, updates later, sleep hopefully soon…
A few more photos are over here on Flickr.
We’re in the final few days before Penelope is due to whelp her puppies, and as a result today was moving day. Tula and Heart have been downstairs, in the room we’ve designated as our ‘whelping room’. It’s basically a spare bedroom off of our family room, which we’ve tiled and added a large wall heater to. It has all of our puppy supplies in it, from heating pads to rubbing alcohol to wet wipes, and the walls are covered with photos of puppies past. I’m sure it makes for an interesting ambience for the overnight guests who stay in it from time to time.
Since this room is the most convenient for me to get to quickly throughout the day while I’m working, it makes sense to put the youngest puppies into it. That meant moving Tula upstairs, to the second spare bedroom.
I’ve never before had to move a mother with a young puppy, and I was a bit apprehensive that Tula might be nervous at being in a new place. We moved the pool she’d been using downstairs, and I kept the same pad and towel in it for her, in hopes it would give her a sense of continuity.
Turns out, I didn’t need to worry.
After ten minutes of sniffing around, Tula popped into the whelping box and settled down to nurse Heart (who couldn’t have cared less about where we moved her, so long as her personal milk bar came along for the ride).
The next step was to let Penelope come into the downstairs whelping room for a good sniff around. She looked at the pool, shrugged, and walked over to the bed and waited for me to pick her up. I popped her into the whelping box and suggested she take a good look around, as she was about to spend quite a bit of time in there, like it or not.
Again with the shrugging, although this time she deigned to at least pretend some interest in the towels and whelping pad. Honestly, she was more concerned with getting out the living room and grabbing one of the good hooves before Dexter got to it. I’m not sure the whole ‘motherhood thing’ concept has kicked in yet with her.
There’s a baby monitor base set up in the upstairs bedroom, and the hand held unit is downstairs, where I can turn it on. This will let me sit with Penelope and her puppies, and listen to Tula and Heart at the same time.
We had it on during dinner, and Sean and I spent ten minutes trying to figure out what the hell Tula was doing up there. We heard what sounded like light construction, including what could possibly have been a load of gravel being dropped out, perhaps for foundation work. Every time the sounds became too intriguing, one of us would dash upstairs, only to find Tula sitting innocently in the whelping box, looking at us with an expression that clearly said “What did you expect to find?”.
I’m thinking about installing one of those Nanny cam things, just so we can figure out where she’s stashing the backhoe.
Heart of Gold continues to grow exponentially cuter with each passing day. If she continues on at this rate, she will radiate a force field of cuteness that can be felt all the way in California. Today, she did the coveted “tongue stuck out milk bubble ear twitch” triple combination, which I believe has been made illegal in two states and at least one territory.
If you look at the large version of this photo, you can see her little nose freckles starting to appear. Over time, they’ll increase in number until her nose and muzzle are completely black. On her ear, you can see the little fringe of white hairs that outline the top edge. It’s a tiny, perfect little outline.
For more cuteness, check out her other photos here.
Hey, check out who made it as the very FIRST Frenchie LOL on Ihasahotdog (LOL Cats – aka ICanHasCheezburger.Com – for dogs).
It’s Mz IzzyBella, now known as Weezie (or DevilDog, to the poor poor puggies who have to put up with her.
Like I said, I can see why she doesn’t make it onto all the fashionable birthday party guest lists. And we thought Paris Hilton was a Diva!
Holy Cows!
Looks like this has been a banner month for cows going nuts all over Ontario!
First I have my own run in with off roadin’, garden crashing, snowbank scaling cows, and now this –
Police shot and killed a steer that escaped from an overturned truck this morning, saying they had no choice because the animal was charging at people.“It charged at one of the officers, right at him, and he had no choice,” Provincial police Sgt. Dave Woodford said.He explained that the animal had actually hit and thrown four other people in a residential neighbourhood of Mississauga. No one was seriously injured.
“These things are big animals and they’re just like bulls. When they charge at you, they’re going to throw you,” he said.
The steer escaped from a cattle truck, along with two cows and a bull. The truck overturned at about 6:40 a.m., snarling traffic on the Queen Elizabeth Way near Highway 427.
Two of the animals ended up in the backyard of a home on Brentano Boulevard.
Initially, the animals were peaceful, calmly munching away at the shrubs in the garden.
“They were rubbing up against my father’s shed. They were fine in the backyard. I guess when they tried to get them out of the backyard, that’s when they got really restless,” said resident Teresa Nimer-Boutros.
The steer got spooked when handlers tried to corral it and force it into a replacement truck. One of a number of portable iron gates used to guide the animals into the truck fell, scaring the steer. He knocked over the driver of the truck who was helping in the effort.
The rest of the story is here.
Poor cow. You kind of have to feel sorry for it, although if you think about what was likely facing them at the end of their journey, being shot by a policeman after a nice run through a garden and few mouthfuls of hedge probably seems like a better way to go out.
The AKC just released their annual registration figures for 2007. The list contains all of the usual popular breeds, with one exception – for the first time since 1935, the Bulldog has entered the top ten most popular breeds list. Bulldogs are most popular in Los Angeles, where they are second only to Labs.
This popularity has made Bulldogs one of the most commonly used dog breeds in wire transfer (or ‘phantom puppy’) scams – this is the scam where ‘breeders’ offer cheap or free puppies, with the prospective owner just paying for the shipping. Fees are to be paid by wire transfer, and once the scammer has collected fees from a handful of people, they disappear, leaving the victims with no puppy, and out the shipping fees they’ve wired. You can learn more about phantom puppy scams here –
http://www.akc.org/news/index.cfm?article_id=3220
http://www.scambusters.org/puppyscams.html
French Bulldogs have exploded in popularity, more so this year than any other. Many of us remember when Frenchies were so little known as to be almost a rare breed – this year, San Francisco and Los Angeles include the French Bulldog in their Top 10 lists.
The increase in popularity of Frenchies is staggering in such a short period of time – they’ve increased +404%, second only to Cavalier King Charles Spaniels, at +406%. This means we can look forward to more puppy mills pumping Frenchies into pet stores, more backyard breeders tossing untested dogs together to make quick buck puppies, and more cheap imports flooding the market and swamping rescue.
We can only hope that this surge in popularity is the crescendo, and that Frenchies can now slip quietly back into obscurity, becoming once again the dog most people assume is a Boston, a deformed eared pug, or a Pot Bellied pig on a leash.
Email Woes
I’ve been going through my semi-semi annual bout of frantic filing, desk re-organizing, correspondence answering and cord sorting out (where the heck do all of those electrical cords and chargers come from that end up buried in my desk drawers? Are they multiplying on their own?). This has all put me rather behind on my email answering, especially since everyone and their brother seems to have decided to contact me about Mae.
If you’ve emailed me, be patient – I should get caught up by Friday.
Puppy Photos
Some new photos of my dapper little brindle man, Dexter. I tried to take some proper body shots, but he’s still at the ‘stop, you’re freaking me out’ stage of table stacking, and shots taken of him on the table show a cowering wreck who looks nothing like the pup I see standing on the floor, at ease. There are a few body shots in here, but in the best one Penelope decided to turn her head and block out Dexter’s. So, if you can ignore the fact that he’s headless, you get a pretty good look at his body.
All of the photos are here —
http://flickr.com/photos
Solo is rapidly developing into the world’s cutest puppy.
Don’t believe me? Check out this photo. Super cute, yes? Almost…. eerily cute?
Yup, it’s true – he has super powers. Eerie, evil, super cute puppy powers. Be afraid.
All the rest of the pix are here –
http://flickr.com/photos/frenchbulldogs/sets/72157603710340910/
Solo is almost at two pounds, finally. He hit a sort of plateau when he was sick a week ago, but he’s been making up for lost time the last few days. He’s gone from eating just under an ounce per feeding to an ounce and a half and change – and this morning, he ate a full two ounces. Time to re-try the pablum!
Sailor just adores him – well, she adores licking him, at any rate. Tessa has given him a few cursory sniffs, but remains steadfast in her adherence to her “I don’t babysit the great grandkids” policy. Can’t say I blame her – she did her time in the puppy trenches.
Here are some photos of Solo at three weeks —
http://www.flickr.com/photos
There are a few in there of Dexter, as well
Solo also has his very first video, mainly consisting of his being adorable and fuzzy.
You can find it on YouTube, or embedded after the cut.
