Shadow has three teats working on one side and four pups. The sisters have formed a collective and take the teats leaving D’Artagnan to have formula. That wouldn’t be a problem, but they need to eat more often but wake him up every time so he says he may as well eat as well. As a result he now weighs 1600g and increase of 145g on yesterday. Today he will be rationed. More to the point the girls will be told to play nicely and each will have to take their turn to be bottle fed so there is a teat for him. It’s either that or switch him to the basic puppy milk which they don’t usually like and is much harder work. Duchess is 1470g having added 80g, which is more what our Mistress expects at this stage. Della is 1400g having added 70g and Dixie is 1385 having added 60g. It means that Dixie will be the one getting formula at the next meal and there will be no top up for D’Artagnan on top of what he gets from his mum.
By tonight they will be two weeks old. I suppose in reality it will be by early tomorrow morning, with D’Artagnan having been last and had to wait for the Caesarean. Usually they would start ‘solids’ if you can call a liquid a solid! at about three weeks, last time it took until they were 23 days old for the pups to get the hang of lapping. Our Mistress is hoping that this litter will learn fast as she suspect that the way things are going Shadow will have weaned them long before they reach 5 or 6 weeks old, which is when she normally stops feeding them.
Now that they can hear what is going on, if our Mistress starts moving about in their room they wake up, so she’s having to spend less time doing things in there and more time back at her desk. That suits us as we miss her when she is not around and if I’m being honest we’ve been playing up a bit.
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