Day 5 A.M. & P.M.

The whelping box does not render me impervious to current events. As I said on Facebook, voting in November will be an act of heroic and necessary bystander intervention.

The cruelty, the incivility, the corruption, the pandemic, the deaths. This is exhausting.

We need to remember it is okay to take breaks from the outrage — that is, in fact, the only way we can sustain it long enough to be part of the necessary changes.

Therefore, I give you puppies — and a break.

All is well here. The puppies are — knock on wood — thriving.

Sage, Paintbrush from the rear, Lupine, and Larkspur - with Mallow in drape mode.

Weight gain is one of our best indicator of how things are going. The smallest puppy — for now — is Mallow; he weighs 17.15 ounces, but is up 41% from his birth weight. Sage is the biggest — for now — at 23.95 ounces but Lupine is nipping his heels at 23.35 ounces.

You will note the noses are blackening up at different rates — they are like fingerprints right now. I did not know this was Larkspur until I checked the distinctive nose pattern.

Daisy continues to be a thoughtful, careful, and attentive mother.

This is Clover the Adventurer on one of her frequent walkabouts — or maybe I should say, dragabouts.

I find their configurations endlessly fascinating — I bet you can tell.

This is Clarkia and as you can tell, she will be darkly marked on that left side.

Markings are tricky. I get that people have preferences — AND it hurts to hear a puppy who was so thoughtfully and carefully bred is somehow less worthy or desired because of something so superficial as markings.

In a “show” puppy, the markings are a bigger deal. In a puppy who will do performance events and/or have an interesting life as a companion, markings are so much less important than all of the other things — like temperament, for example.

This is how I see it: If love for a puppy is conditional on something so superficial as markings — well, my puppies deserve better than that.