Only one more week until the puppies are born. My Mistress has to keep reminding me that there is still a lot that can go wrong. It’s hard not to get excited when you realise this could nearly double the numbers of dogs like me that there are in the country. I do like being uncommon, but I’d like there being more like me even better. It made me think when I saw that a woman in America has had octuplets. It shows how uncommon that must be as the spellchecker is telling me it’s not a word. It’s ok for a dog that has a lot of puppies, because after eight weeks they all go to new homes and it isn’t impossible for the mum to bring them all up, but how does a human cope with that many? You would need a full time nappy changer for a start, quite apart from a bus to travel round in and you’d need plenty of space for bunk beds as soon as they were big enough not to fall off the top one. I suppose on the bright side the babies weren’t identical, so you wouldn’t have the problem of never knowing which was which. You certainly wouldn’t want them all to want their own pets, even if they were as lovely as me. It was bad enough at the doctor’s the other day when one baby was there for inoculations and screamed so much that everyone in the waiting room dropped their resemblance to cardboard cut outs and spoke to each other, but if there were eight screaming at the same time the other patients could be forgiven for going home again. At least on the bright side you could negotiate some good discounts buying eight of everything and you’d need a never ending supply of marker pens so that the children knew which item belonged to them.