There are many measures by which our Mistress marks the progress of the puppies. One is how many sheets of newspaper she needs as a depth below the vet bedding to absorb the puppy pee. She always starts at 4 pages, but rarely do they really need that much to begin with. Yesterday they went up to five and she’s already thinking about moving to six! We store newspapers on an ongoing basis, since the time we ran out and James got concussion going into the recycling bin in the village to get some out. It was a long story and perhaps best not revisited. Anyway, there are piles of newspapers everywhere at the moment but they will go down over the next few weeks. They would go down faster if we had more puppies as in a few weeks our Mistress will need to clean the pen out more than once a day, but it isn’t so often with fewer of them. Anyway, that won’t be until they are in the big pen in the office which is another week and a half away. I think our Mistress is going to move the furniture and build the pen this weekend. That’s when everything gets interesting and all the toys come out. Our Mistress has being buying extra toys so they should have plenty to occupy them.
They are all doing very well and now trying to put weight on their back legs as well. Their weights are D’Artagnan 1220g, an increase of 80g. Duchess 1205g, an increase of 85g. Dixie 1120g and increase of 70g and Della 1105g and increase of 85g. However that is with them being offered a bottle top up each meal. Shadow is really not managing to produce enough. If we don’t give them a top up then go round and round in circles looking for milk and only sleep for an hour between meals. When they are happy and full they now sleep about two hours or a little more between meals.
Shadow is off to the vet to have her stitches out today. She says she’s not really looking forward to it, but it will be nice to have her checked over to make sure all has healed as expected.
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