The Fun Begins at 12:15

The Fun Begins at 12:15

Sequel to the Sock in My Left Pocket

I am now on Dog Time.  Yesterday seems like it is a million miles away.  Today is for napping and eating and getting my head together (good luck to me) and going to the dump…. Every dog in this house is napping right now.  Well, except for the one that just squeaked, but maybe he is napping while squeaking.  The smartest two things I did this week were:  (1) I bought a nanny cam so I can actually see the Puppy Room from anywhere else in the house besides standing right there.  This is a huge advantage.  I can now go up to the kitchen table and eat without wondering what is going on down there and who is squeaking and why.  If you want to understand a portion of this maternal anxiety for my puppies, download a You Tube of the episode of I Love Lucy where their son Little Ricky is a baby in the crib and Lucy hovers over the crib to make sure he is still breathing.  Finally, she can’t stand it and she pinches him.  That’s the maternal psychosis that starts to take over if you are not careful, or supported by people who can say, “Let me be your helicopter; you need to drive out somewhere and get a cheeseburger.”  Which leads me to the second smartest thing (I believe) that I did this week.

In my last entry you remember me talking about watching the sunrise with the dog who just couldn’t seem to let her puppies get born.  She was panting and walking and doing all the other routine, earthly things dogs do to cooperate with whelping.  Perhaps she was making progress internally, but externally, I was starting to wear around the edges of sanity.  She was at least one, maybe two, days beyond her due date.  I actually put a lawn chair on the grass at 6:45 am and sat there in my fleece-lined coat looking at the morning MOON.  Madeline Grace ambled over to me and put two paws up on my knees.  This, too, was more than a friendly gesture.  It would help the pups move down into position for their Journey.  She did this when she was still talking to me.  At present, 24+ hours later, she has not really forgiven me.  In the haze of the late morning I decided to ask the question WWTVD?  “What would the Vet Do?” 

My experience has been that if you panic and run to the vet, you end up with a caesarean section.  I was trying to avoid that.  I KNOW that Madeline is physically capable of birthing a litter of puppies without intervention because she did it the first time she was bred.  It was the second time she did not … because she had only one pup and he was a hefty 10 ounce guy who didn’t want to let go of the grapevine and jump into the lake of life.  So the vet had to go in and get him via c-section… four days after his due date.  He made it, and grew up to be a spunky little rascal now in a great home with a little boy who loves him. 

In this case, I just washed my hands and put two fingers in the back door to see if anyone was stuck in the birth canal.  And like most non-veterinarians or brand new ones, I said, “I don’t know what the heck I’m feeling.”  Needless to say, Madeline was non-plussed by this intrusion.  I put her in her kennel so we could just continue waiting until I had a better idea, grabbed a can of spray paint and went and painted my milkcan that my mailbox sticks out of.  I painted it red, mostly because I’m tired of the plow hitting it in the winter.  Fifteen minutes later, I went in to check on Madeline and there she was cleaning up her first born puppy.  12:15 pm, the fun had begun.

Text exchange between my friend who owns the litter’s daddy continued.  She said, “I start to panic if a second one isn’t born within 40 minutes.”  I remembered the first litter I attended where I waited ten hours for the second one to come and that required a shot of oxytocin by the vet.  About five minutes before 2pm, I picked up the phone to at least talk to the veterinary technician.  In the middle of me explaining progress or lack thereof and her talking over her shoulder to a nearby vet in the office, Madeline pushed the door to go outside – I let her onto the grass and as she spun in smaller and smaller circles, I saw the tip of legs begin to protrude.  I went to her and eased him out.  Whopping boy #2 whom I named Artemus Gordon because although he was an important character, he always seemed to follow James West on the show The Wild, Wild West. 

From this point we had a 3:30 pm and 4:30 pm delivery of boys, boys, boys.  A vague idea of a house full of boy puppies crossed my mental grid.  I’m going to have my hands full when these guys reach 8 weeks.  At this point, my Puppy Socialization Specialist came home from her day at high school.  She visited with me over the back fence for a while and then went home for a bite to eat.  She came back around 5:30 pm, and again Madeline wanted to go to the back yard, and birthed our beautiful girl Mariette Joy.  Our final birth count being five puppies, my attention now shifts to, as the song said, “Stayin’ Alive, stayin’ alive….”

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