These babies are doing great! Chonks! Because Ruby is a first time mother, we have been extra careful to ensure she feels comfortable with her duties and is being safe with her puppies. We haven’t left her at home by herself since she whelped, save for an hour yesterday when I had a work appointment at the office. Jonathan has the media tools set up to observe, and the video and sound is excellent, so we know if someone is worried, or needs immediate attention. Ruby is such a good mother. She has had a little bit of a learning curve in figuring out how to hold the little ones while cleaning them (remember that they don’t urinate or defecate without their mother’s licking stimulation at this age), and at about day 2-3 she got it figured out without needing any help. Ruby has been patient and has had it tested, as we have one little guy, a sleep terrorist, whom needs TLC before sleeping and really is a momma’s boy right now. The rest of the pups are in their routine of sleeping and eating and getting cleaned up for the next round. The pups are sleeping about 90% of the time, their eyes and ears are closed, but they bark, squeak, squawk, twitch like they were dreaming of running after a bunny in their last lives. When awake, they are crawling and calling to their mum. Two of the little tykes (Liver/Wh Boy 2 and Black/Wh Girl)are pretty mobile, and I predict that they will be the first to ditch the whelping pool and begin exploring when their eyes open.

Our whelping pen is Lucite and aluminum because we need draft control when it is -18 outside and doors are opened and closed regularly for our big dogs and the door to the garage. I’ve had a few questions about my comfort using a kiddy pool as a whelping station – actually, Ruby had the pups on the waterproof pad covered floor in the lucite pen with a king sized blanket on top to keep heat in and imitate a den, which Ruby loves still. She was a bit worried before we covered it (and three side covered it), but we leave the pen gate open when its just her and the pups in the room. The room has a heater set to 74 and our heated floor is set to 85 and there is an additional pet heating pad under the waterproof blanket in the pool. That has some slip proof rubber nodes on the back, so it is adhering to the pool nicely and there hasn’t been an issue with scratching it or bunching it up. I change it every day, now, since the tykes are eating more and pooping and peeing more and though Ruby keeps up with them, I like it freshened each day. We will pull the pool when their eyes are opened next weekend and put in a elevated bed for Ruby in there so she can get some self-care space between eating and cleaning. The pen has two more panels that we can put in it when the pups are more active and I love that they can’t get their heads or paws through the fencing. We also have nice wire kennels but those will come into play later in different rooms in the house.

The Vtech baby monitor has come in handy this week and I’m grateful that Jonathan set it up so we can watch and hear them while I work from home and keep up with household duties. I tell you, even though they are not very active yet, I could sit and stare and hold/pet them for hours and I have to set a timer to keep my life on track.

At night, I’m sleeping in the same room as the pups and Ruby, with a nice Japanese napping futon rolled out on the floor. Ruby enjoys that one-on-one time, too, and she’s rejoining me between feedings and cleaning – snuggling up and sleeping hard while the neonates sleep.

Several people asked me about what I’m feeding Ruby. I feed Purina and a mix of floated in warm water puppy food and adult dog food – it’s Purina Pro Plan lamb and rice (not for large breeds) and Purina One lamb and rice for adult dogs. She doesn’t like straight puppy food, but I get her to eat by adding in a topper – some dairy in the form of unsweetened plain greek yogurt or cottage cheese in her food for interest and upping her PH in her urine. She is supplemented with Oxy Momma minerals and vitamins for lactation and recovery support. We are adjusting the amount daily, and she is currently eating about 2.75 x her usual amount of feed broken up over several times a day. She has access to cool fresh water outside her pen. You never want a water dish in the pen with pups at this age, for fear of drowning pups that might wander or fall into it. I also don’t feed Ruby by her puppies, because we don’t want to create problems or safety issues.

Our pups had their dew claws removed on Day 3 with Dr. Clinton and none bled through their dab of glue or had a hard time with it. There was a ton of new snow in Anchorage that morning, and we were grateful that Meredith Mapes set the appointment up for us and thankful that Dr. Clinton came in and saved us a trip to the Valley on potentially precarious 2 hour roundtrip drive. We transported the pups in a thick cardboard box, (though a cooler would have been nice, too) with a thick towel as a the floor insulation, the heated pet pad under their thin towel, put a light fleece blanket over them and closed the box and put my long down coat around it. We plugged in the heating pad and set it to 85 degrees and the pups barely noticed that they weren’t in their pen. Ruby was concerned, but she was also happy her winter coat fits again, and she remembered Dr. Clinton and gave her a nice big Dal smile and showed Dr. Clinton her pups with pride.

We planned on doing some cute face photos and weighing the little tykes this weekend and I’ll post them here when we get them put on a graphic. I see spammers or hackers stealing puppy photos from others and I will make it a little harder for someone to do that by creating a graphic instead of just dropping photos. I tell you, if people worked as hard on being or doing better as hard as they work on nefarious angles it would be a much better world! Unfortunately, this is why I cannot open up comments on this page to everyone, because when I did, in a matter of hours, I had 55 spam messages. If you create an account on our website, you can comment to posts, though. That way we can keep the spam down and hackers at bay.

We are posting daily on our socials – mainly to Facebook on the Queen Of Hearts Dals page – and you can see my efforts to capture sweetness and personality hints on there. If you are not a socials person, no fear! If you are one of our future puppy owners, just email or text me and I’ll send pics and videos by text or email (though probably only a few times a week).