Rote works for me…

I like predictable…

 

Repetition is the cornerstone of daily existence…

Puppy-care is very repetitious…

Feed…….Potty…….Clean-up…….Sleep…….Feed…….Potty…….Clean-up…….Sleep…….

It’s Much Like:                   Rinse…..Lather…..&  Repeat…..

It’s a routine that works for me…

The hard part is fitting in the “rest of the day”…

I try to do hit and run attacks on the other normal daily routines, so that those routines gets completed too…….

…..albeit not in the usual time-frame…….

…..which the horses regularly point out to me…….

I swear they have wristwatches around their fetlocks…….because they are out there in the pasture tapping their little princess hoovies in disdain at my tardiness…….

We still have seven puppies…

Five little girls (however one is VERY, VERY small—she’s about one-third the size of everybody else)…….

…..she weighs nine ounces, while her brothers and sisters weigh well over one pound each…….

And two little boys…

Good ole’ Killian is producing enough milk…….so far…

…..AND she likes them!!!

…..which is a HUGE plus!

I don’t have to sit on her head to make sure she lays still while her puppies nurse…….

…..which we’ve had to do before on many more than one occasion with other Irish Wolfhounds…

We are feeding every three hours at this stage…

Everyone (but the littlest girl) is heartily nursing from Killian…

…..the little girl needs to be tube-fed…

She did nurse twice from Mom…….so she did get colostrum…….but then she stopped suckling…….(?)…

…..not good…

I stepped in with my syringe and abdominal tube…….and voila!…….instant warm meal in her tummy…

I even was able to collect some more colostrum to add to her meals…….

…..I’m here to say…..collecting milk from a Wolfhound is far, far more difficult than milking a dairy goat…….

Time will tell…….I’ll just keep doing what I’m doing…….Mother Nature has her own plans…….although, I can’t stop thinking about loosing the entirety of our last litter…….

…..so so very sad…..

…..the official necropsy reports from that doomed litter only said “failure to thrive”…….that really doesn’t give me a lot to go on, now does it?…….

But I’ll embrace Little Orphan Annie’s approach here…….

The sun’ll come out tomorrow…….bet your bottom dollar, there’ll be sun…….

…….(but it’s one of those middle-of-the-night feedings right now…….so I can’t tell yet)…….

…….I’ll just keep at it…….

…….Rinse…….Lather…….&  Repeat…….

 

 

*******Sad Addendum*******