I can not believe how fast this year has gone by. It seems like just a few months ago we were keeping track of and cleaning up after nine little fuzzy puppies. Now as I write this I look over and see our big girl poodle who is turning a year old. How can our tiny Pixie be a year old already!?!
Last summer was a crazy one. We welcomed a pregnant standard poodle into our home with two days notice and did a mad scramble to make room and get an area set up for her and her puppies. She gave us two surprises. First she delivered two weeks before the due date we were given. Second, she had nine puppies instead of the eight that we thought and that we were expecting.
When we agreed to take on whelping and raising a litter I had visions of puppy heaven. Sitting in the whelping box with mom, rubbing baby puppy feet and having the picture perfect experience. Well, like pretty much every experience in life, things didn’t exactly go as we envisioned.
Momma Lotus was very nervous when she first arrived to our home, and that was very understandable. She didn’t know us at all. She warmed up a little bit to us during the week she was with us before the puppies arrived. We were amazed how she let us help her with the birth of all 9 puppies. But only an hour after the last puppy was born she became very protective and wouldn’t let us near her puppies. This was very unexpected and difficult.
Newborn puppies require a fair amount of monitoring. They need to be weighed daily to make sure that they are gaining weight. They need to be watched to make sure that they are active. They need to be monitored to make sure that they are warm and that they are nursing well. The first few days we had to be improvisational and wait until Lotus went out to potty to be able to check on the puppies. This was stressful for both her and us. She would get very agitated being separated from her puppies and I was nervous that we would miss something do to the fact we had to rush through changing the bedding in the whelping box, weighing all nine puppies, and getting fresh food and water for Lotus as fast as possible in the time span of a few minutes
There were other challenges the first week other than Lotus being protective of the puppies. Lotus refused to eat almost everything we offered. She would only eat chicken breasts. This is not ideal for a dog nursing with nine newborns. She was already underweight when she arrived to us and she didn’t have any body reserves. She was taken to the Veterinarian and cleared of any major illnesses luckily. To our relief she finally started eating after about a week and once she started eating she literally didn’t stop. We have never seen a dog consume so much food. At one point she was eating 10 cups of food a day.
The other challenge that came up during the first few days involved the smallest puppy of the litter. Pixie was losing weight instead of gaining weight. She was very weak on the 3rd day after her birth and we were very concerned about her. We stepped in and had to remove Lotus from the room. Consequently she and the puppies were separated a few times a day so we could bottle feed Pixie. The first couple of sessions didn’t go too great, but by day two of bottle supplements Pixie was nursing from the bottle well and beginning to get stronger. She also started gaining weight everyday like the rest of the litter. She was still significantly smaller than the rest of the puppies, but she was a little fighter and we were able to see she was doing better.
Pixie wasn’t the only puppy that we gave supplemental feedings to. I noticed that Lotus was not producing large quantities of milk despite eating really well. All the puppies were supplemented with formula to help Lotus out and they thrived because of it.
It took a couple of weeks but we finally gained Lotus’ trust and she began to allow us to be around her and the puppies all at the same time. After that milestone we began to have a wonderful experience. While having a litter of nine adorable puppies was a lot of fun, it was also a lot of work. By the time the puppies were four to five weeks old we started to wean them onto blended puppy food. Consequently Lotus decided to stop cleaning up after them and our work got more difficult.
Our days started off at 7am feeding the puppies. Then transitioned to moving them to their new enclosure downstairs. Then the cleanup process from the mess they made in the space Matt called the “Growing Up Guide Pup Room”. There were two loads of laundry each morning, cleaning the food dishes and blender, cleaning the toys that had been pooped and peed on and scrubbing the floor. Once that room was cleaned it was off to clean up their downstairs enclosure. After that it was lunch served followed by another load of laundry from the downstairs enclosure and nap time for the puppies. Then I walked the older dogs before I headed to work. Around 3pm Matt came home from his work and he took over for the evening while I was at gone. More cleaning up from nine puppies going potty after that because they went a lot. Then Matt took care of feeding dinner and giving evening walks for the older dogs. When I got home from work at around midnight is was one last feeding for the puppies and then getting them set up for bedtime. Another load of bedding in the wash, hosing down the outside area, and cleaning the floor in the inside pen, cleaning dishes, and toys before crawling into bed around 2am.
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