Oh you’d have laughed. The new fish / luggage scales have arrived, so armed with a pillow case, the scales and the puppies, the weighing began. Most of the puppies seemed to think the pillow case was huge fun and every time my Mistress put it down to write down the last weight, they would clamber in. She then had to fish them all out, find a puppy that hadn’t been weighed and put him in the pillowcase before the others got in. She can only put them all in the washing basket when there is someone to supervise the basket, otherwise they led by Amigo they all climb out. What the weighing has concluded is that Shadow is no longer producing enough milk to feed all of them. Fortunately they are all at a stage where they can lap and not need a bottle, so the job for the next 24 hours is to teach them all to lap milk from a shallow dish. Then what my Mistress is planning is at each feed taking one pup out of the mix to feed from the dish, while the others feed from their mum. That way they will all still get the benefit of their mum’s milk but there will be a little bit more to go round. It’s good in theory, it may have to apply to more than one pup at a sitting for it to work. They are all still gaining but very slowly, whereas now they really ought to be going up by about 100g in a day, some of them are only going up by about 20g. They will catch up, but they need a bit of help.
Shadow said thank you to my friend Alfie for the kiss he sent, but my Mistress was disappointed that there wasn’t one for her too.
Dear little Aristotle is no longer the smallest. He now weighs 900g and is a whole 10g ahead of Avril. I think she is the one who has suffered most from not being able to get enough milk as she hasn’t learnt some of the tricks of tunnelling underneath everyone else that Aristotle has. He is still my favourite and I am still campaigning for him to be able to stay, but no one seems to be listening to me. I got my Master to hold him for this photo and I have to say they were starting to bond quite well so perhaps there’s hope.
I remember drinking milk from a bowl when I was a little pup so my mummy must have had the same problem as Shadow!
I’m feeling ashamed that I didn’t send a kiss to your mistress too Alfie, I know she is working really hard to hep Shadow with the pups so here’s a big slobbery kiss for her too 🙂
Here’s a photo of me and my siblings feasting on milk from a bowl when we were a couple of weeks old (at our humans first visit) http://www.alfiesblog.com/entlebucher-fun/year-dogs-cv/attachment/puppies-2/