A long weekend...

Heating Pad Gang

I hope you all enjoyed Memorial Day weekend and took a moment to remember the men and women who died while serving their country in the military. 

We are fighting a little skirmish of our own as the puppies agonizingly slow weight gain finally prompted us to take them to the vet on Sunday to see if we could figure out what was going on.  Thank heavens for the reproductive specialist I go to who makes time to deal with these issues at all hours and is only a cell phone call away.  She concurred that the pups all looked healthy: good heart sounds, no cleft palates, normal temperature, good poops... 

Pixie has unusual markings on her tummy.

Sadly we did lose a pup on Saturday morning.  Little Kiwi seemed fine one minute and was gaining at about the same pace as her siblings, and was gone across the Rainbow Bridge just as quickly.  Heartbreaking...

The vet believes that Ecko is not producing as much milk as she should, or that the caloric content of her milk is not high enough.  She is now on medication that will hopefully increase her milk flow and, in the mean time, Jan and I have to make up the difference.   Our options were to attempt to bottle feed the pups or to tube feed them and, given the information that tube feeding is the safer alternative (there is less risk the pups will aspirate than with bottle feeding), we chose to follow that option.  We are currently tube feeding them twice a day and have seen a noticeable increase in weight gain since then.

Pixie taking a nap with Mama

Pictures will get more interesting as the pups get older.  Don't read anything into the fact that Pixie got her pics taken more than the others for this update - she just happened to strike a couple of cute poses.