Well after yesterday’s little hiccough the puppy weights are all back on track. They guzzled milk as fast as it was offered for the first few feeds and then slowed down until at breakfast this morning they all said they needed a bit more time to process what they’d already had. They want feeding about every three hours, which wouldn’t be so bad if they went to sleep as soon as the feed was finished. D’Artagnan did one of his crying for no reason things last night for about an hour after the midnight feed and our Mistress was not impressed. The other problem now they see and hear everything that is going on, is that the minute our Mistress goes into the room, even to get our food, they are awake and demanding attention. She is trying to think ahead as to what’s needed, but she says that’s easier said than done when she’s suffering from sleep deprivation.
D’Artagnan now weighs a massive 1960g. He added 200g from yesterday but if you look at it across the two days only 190g in that time so a normal level of increase. Della is now 1780g and having been the smallest girl is now the largest. She’s still lovely according to our Mistress! She weighs 1780g an increase of 170g since yesterday and 200g over two days. Duchess is now 1745g which is an increase of 165g over the two days and Dixie is 1705g an increase of 160g over two days. That means purely in weight terms they are about 11 days ahead of Aristotle’s litter! 5 days ahead of our B litter and 4 days ahead of our C litter – but then it is the first time that our Mistress has realised they needed bottle feeding as soon as there was a problem. With the other litters Shadow had been ill for a few days or more before we knew there was a problem. She isn’t ill this year, she just hasn’t got much milk and that doesn’t seem to be changing. We’re now only four days away from trying to see if they are ready to lap milk and if they can manage that they will start to move onto ‘solids’ although the first version of the solid is about as liquid as milk so it’s funny calling it that. It has baby rice in it to give it a big of body. After that they will start having baby food introduced, but you have to be careful which recipes of baby food you use as most of them contain things like onion which we cannot have. It’s always easiest if the manufacturers don’t mess about with the recipes so we can find they one they’ve liked in the past. Then before you know it they will be on the puppy version of the food we have. Because Shadow is wheat intolerant they have the lamb and rice version which doesn’t have any wheat in to be on the safe side.
Anyway, if our Mistress has time she’s going to set the big pen out ready today and I’ll take a photo so you can see what it looks like before the move into it.
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