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First Video – Tula’s French Bulldog Puppies

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Striker, Paula’s little pied boy that Tula is fostering, is having a few problems. He’s losing weight, and is substantially smaller than Tula’s beefy little boys (who’ve gained 30 grams or so each, in less than 24 hours, while Striker has lost 15). The differences are even more striking when I remind myself that he’s almost three days older than the boys.

He’ll be getting some extra nursing time, and is also receiving subcutaneous fluids – which is a nice way of saying that a few times a day I’ll be injecting fluids into him with a needle that’s longer than he is. The fluids go in ‘subcutaneous’, meaning ‘under the skin’, as opposed to injected into muscle tissue, so he rarely does more than squirm a bit while I’m hydrating him. I’m the one who’s being a big baby about it.

Hopefully, we’re just playing catch up with the ground he lost while he was being bottle fed. If you didn’t cross your fingers for us yesterday, it would be nice if you did so today.

French Bulldogs Are Like A Box of Chocolates…

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Well, so much for my plans this weekend to grind up and freeze a great big bucket of green lamb tripe. Lamb tripe, by the way, is a really fancy way of saying “Stinky, unprocessed lamb stomach”, and “green” is code for “complete with partially digested stomach contents”. And yes, it smells just about the way it sounds – possibly worse.

Sean, who I fondly refer to as ‘garbage guts’ for his cast iron stomach and willingness to eat almost anything, gagged and retched when I cheerfully told him that the big, reeking bucket of guts was more or less just what he’d eaten when he taste tested Sailor’s canned green tripe. The real retching happened when I asked him if he’d be tasting this batch, too. I think that can be taken as a ‘no’.

At any rate, we never did get the lamb stomachs ground up, because Bunny decided to surprise us by going into labor three days early.

In spite of my panic attacks about her early labor, she managed to deliver five adorable babies, and after an initial twelve hours of telling me “those things aren’t mine – you look after them’, she’s back in the swing of being a supermom. She’s such a good girl – keeps her babies tucked underneath her, almost entirely hidden away, and cleans them at the first sign of squeaking.

I had assumed Bunny and Luther might produce brindles, possibly a brindle pied. What I wasn’t expecting was this little beauty –

French Bulldog colors – who the heck knows. You can’t even begin to guess, at least not most of the time. You just have to sit back and wait for them to get here.

Here’s the rest of the photos, down below. All of the images will be in one great big collection, which you’ll find here.

Oh, and this litter’s names? Neil Gaiman book titles.

A) because I love Neil Gaiman
B) because I love the name ‘Coraline’
C) because I just got my copy of “The Graveyard Book“, and it’s so good I’m already checking his site for news of sequels.