Adrian and the babies

Once again today, it's sunny outside but only about 40 degrees outside, so the babies have to play indoors again. Adrian loves getting to sit and play with them at this stage.

Wild babies

The babies are SOOO ready to be out of their whelping box to explore the world that we couldn't resist them any longer. Normally at this stage we start putting them outside in our grass kennel, but it's been too cold for them to go outside so far. This was the next best thing, getting to run wild in our house. All the pups had a lot of fun and some even discovered you can't take corners full speed if your running on hard wood floors!

Meal time

The babies are now getting Purina Pro Chicken and Rice Puppy Chow twice a day and they are loving it. They are also looking very good now that they are getting solid food along with Jazz's milk. Jazz is still nursing them frequently but they were starting to look a little thin, so we knew it was time to supplement their diets. They'll need to be on Puppy Chow from here on out until they are 1 year old.

Chew pillow

The babies really love having chew toys now, they even play right up until they fall asleep - then dream about playing with their toys.

Growing pains

For some odd reason, all the puppies seem to go through this stage where they insist on sleeping OUTSIDE of their pool instead of inside. There is just enough room around the outside edge of the pool to squeeze between the x-pen and the pool. Soon they will be too big for this little trick, but meanwhile they spend as much time in this space as possible. Our four month old pups love this as well, it gives them a chance to lick the little pups through the fencing because they cannot get away from their wet tongues.

2nd Cousins

Hunter and Soggy are completely in love with the little puppies. Anytime they are allowed to, they are right in the puppy room, cleaning faces and even trying to play through the x-pen with the little ones. The little one's have chewed on each other's collars enough that we've had to remove them. We will put collars on them when we do their stacked photos or individual photos, but they will be living without from here on out. Thanks to their spots it's fairly easy for Adrian and I to tell who is who without their collars anyhow.

Cool clean water

Here's blue getting a drink (and washing her toes). Right now we just use a pie plate for their water, which works well seeing they like to walk in the water as much as drinking it.

Full bellies and a nice nap

The pups have been just a little bit on the thin side, so today they received their first solid meal. They dug right in as soon as we sat the bowel in their pen, as if they've been eating puppy chow for days. After their meal they were all very happy to take a nice long nap.

Once the pups woke up they had the full treatment: weighed, examined, nails clipped, hearing checked and wormed. I'm happy to report that all pups have brown eyes (no blues), all have complete eye trim, only a couple are missing a bit of nose trim, and all showed signs that they hear in both ears. This was also the first time I've got to see them in the daylight since they developed their spots ~ I was able to confirm this litter is 100% liver spotted babies. Although this is statistically not likely, it can happen (and has). We've been going back and forth on a few of them, hoping they were black spotted as I originally thought when born, but today in the daylight it was clear that they are all livers.

Visitors

The puppies have had lots of visitors lately, but today "Auntie Jordan" came for the day and got to have some puppy time while here. She helped us work on registration names for the babies and we had a fun day. The babies were all very excited to play, then suddenly they all fell asleep - just like babies, play hard, then sleep hard!