Staying Alive

Still alive. Been busy with various puppy related tasks and for the first time since before Christmas I was able to get out of the house for a few hours last night and have dinner at a friend's house. Raimi and Petal came and Raimi played like mad with her two dogs. Well, Raimi played, Petal supervised.

The camera has pooped out on me so I can't upload new pics to the computer - how frustrating. Everyone is still growing like weeds and are finally throwing themselves into the food dishes with aplomb. The food consumption seems to match the food excretion and there's a lot of cleaning up being done.

Finally there are a couple who are taking to the water and sticking their little noses in and kinda sorta drinking. The rest of them seem to think the water dish is where they stop to clean the pee and poop from their feet before stumbling back to bed.

Paper training progresses pretty well, if they are in the pen and realize they have to go they run onto the paper - if they are not in the pen then it's a sh!t show. Literally. I try to catch them just as act one begins (deciding where to poo), carry them to the pen for act two(preparing the bowels) and act three (poo debut). Sometimes there's an encore of more poo but usually it's just one curtain call and off to play again. Peeing involves far less preparation and is usually something I can't catch in time. It's a good thing generally because peeing doesn't typically stop when you pick them up - they just keep going and leave a trail dribbling behind them.

It occurs to me that the inner workings of puppies and dogs probably shouldn't hold so much interest but it is a general rule of thumb that if everything is going in and coming out normally ... you're pretty healthy. Nothing like a change in out-put to set off alarm bells. That's why the passage of the diarrhea incident has me sleeping better.