The Aspirational Due Date Has Arrived!

Mary-Ann Sontag May 24, 2020

Daisy is looking a wee bit haggard this morning.

Her friends stop by to suggest she should get this birthday show on the road.

rePete is helping out by keeping the puppy scale warm.

Daisy is pretty convinced the hole in the yard is the place to have her babies — she even helpfully enlarged it to make space for her impending brood. Given her misguided notions about what constitutes an appropriate birthing suite, she is always accompanied when outside.

Luckily, Daisy is a cooperative sort of girl — and considerate. I slept all night (until 4:00 a.m.) and now Daisy is no doubt making sure Suzanne gets to sleep in before the birthday party begins.

8:20 pm

We had another temp drop today and serious digging…

…but no puppies yet…

Due Date Has Arrived But No Puppies Yet (as of 7 pm)

Mary-Ann Sontag May 23, 2020

Daisy’s temp dropped towards 99 yesterday in the late afternoon and was back to near 100 by evening — good thing I was checking every 2 - 3 hours yesterday or I would have missed it.

She had a good night under the watchful eye of Dear Husband and is resting uncomfortably this morning. If Daisy has read the playbook, puppies should begin arriving later today. Note: Dogs cannot actually read.

In the meantime, this is how things look at Puppy Central. I now have a desk next to the whelping box…

This is the view from over Dear Husband’s vantage point/chair.

The footstool has a story.

One of my wonderful sisters was in the midst of a small issue with garage sales — as in she spent all of her Saturdays finding bargains. Many years ago she gave me that garage sale footstool as a joke — it is ridiculously garish.

My return joke to her was/is that I love it!

But yes, it is time to get it refurbished — or whatever it is called when they put four colors of new velvet on an old garage sale footstool that probably cost $3.

I will update this post at the point at which I make the call to Suzanne to hurry over and help catch puppies.

(7 pm)

Daisy has been resting and panting today but you know what they say about that watched pot…

Large and Holding Steady

Mary-Ann Sontag May 22, 2020

Behold the difference six weeks makes — in figure and attitude…

The father of Daisy’s litter is GCH Pinnacle's Josey Wales AXP OJP FDC TKN SCN DD CGC. Known as Major, he is six years old and an intelligent, kind, and accomplished dog.

Major is also the father of our J Litter (The Sparklers). We are grateful to his humans for trusting us with another special litter of Majorly Awesome Puppies.

Because accidental suffocation of newborn puppies is a sad and real thing, we take advantage of our natural sleep patterns to have awake and attentive eyeballs on our puppies 24/7 for at least the first two weeks. We have already settled into the Puppy Central Routine — Dear Husband stays up overnight and I take over between 4 and 4:30 a.m.

Dear Husband shared this cell phone photo from last night — Harper and rePete getting things ready…

They are not the only ones. Daisy’s temperature is hovering at 100 but going up slower and not as high — I think we are getting closer to the warning drop, and I am certain Daisy is more than ready to get this show on the road.