Lots to be thankful for...

Chili's birthday is the day after Thanksgiving (23rd) and we are very thankful to have her. She is an excellent snuggler but also has the pizazz to be fun to play with in obedience, water work and agility. Without Chili, there would be no Stoker and no puppies this fall, so we are thankful for her for that too.

With three weeks of pregnancy to go, Stoker is doing well and her appetite is still good. She doesn't have much of a waist anymore, but still looks comfortable and is quite active. It is during the last third of pregnancy that the pups do most of their growing, so I expect she will start increasing in girth pretty quickly.

Stoker will start getting a bit of extra food and foods with increased nutrient density in upcoming weeks. As the pups get larger and take up more space, she'll get smaller, but more frequent meals with concentrated foods like meat, eggs, liver, etc.

Nesting

Since Stoker's pregnancy was confirmed last Monday, Jan and I have been talking about what needs to be accomplished around the house in order to make the back room ready for puppies and the rest of the house ready for all the human guests that puppies bring.

Today, we began clearing out the back bedroom. This room seems to end up doubling as a storage room for us. We ended the day by loading the van with some items from the garage, back room and yard that needed disposal at the dump, and the "elephant" as we lovingly call our Honda Element, with items for Goodwill.

After we finished our dump run (Stoker went with us and mooched biscuits from the transfer station attendants), I spent some time at the computer ordering some puppy related items (new mats for the whelping box, a scale and a microwaveable heating disk).

The photos in the slideshow are of Kilo and Stoker. The last photo is of Stoker's ultrasound. Can you see the two pups on the ultrasound? The others were camera shy...