October 29, 2013 Hooray! PUPPIES!!!

On Friday, we were watching a movie in the playroom when Mom called, "Puppies!" We all ran upstairs to see the puppies being born. There are in a sac when they are born. Annie had to chop off the puppies' umbilical cords with her mouth. It stunk a little, and it was really messy. She got blood all over her tail, and she licked the puppies so that they were clean. The first puppy was almost white. The first puppy tried to nurse, but there were other puppies coming out so Annie was too busy to nurse. It was kind of scary and kind of exciting to watch. This was my first puppy birth. We had to pile a lot of newspapers in the whelping box. The x-ray showed that she would have at least five puppies, but she had nine altogether. At seven puppies we thought that Annie was done giving birth. We waited an hour and gave her a shot of oxytocin. Then, Annie ran outside in the cold night air, and mom followed her. Annie ran almost to the field and suddenly she started to have another puppy! Mom caught the puppy in the sack with the placenta still attached. Mom ran back to the house, dripping blood. Blood spattered all over the deck and the hot-tub room. Mom's nurse friend opened the sack and rubbed the puppies belly to get it breathing. That is the smallest puppy. Immediately after Mom brought in the puppy, Annie jumped into the whelping box and delivered another puppy. We have nine Goldendoodle puppies. I am logging the daily weight of the smallest puppy, and plotting the data on a graph. Mom and Dad tried to mark all the puppies with marker so that we could tell them apart, but Annie licked off the markings. Then we tried to mark the puppies with colored ribbons, but they came off too. Today, we tried to mark the puppies with hairbands, but many of those already came off. Really, we just need to watch the littlest one, so Mom marked its hands, feet, ears, head and tail with black Sharpie marker. We hope that Annie doesn't lick that all off too. All the darker colored puppies are bigger. One of the darker puppies is feisty and loud. He's the first one to get milk, and the first to try to stand. He was the second puppy born. The puppies lie on top of each other because they were all smashed up in Annie's belly and that keeps them warm. We've had a lot of friends over to see the puppies. I hope the little one does well. It's hard to take care of that many puppies, but it's a lot of fun too.