Kaibab Bernese Mountain Dogs

I have no doubt that you will share my distress at the apparent malfunction of the camera. We have a very nice Nikon digital camera and it has stopped working. I did all the tricks that were suggested to no avail – it continues to flash “err”, which makes me want to “grrrr”! I am hoping that when my husband arrives tonight he can restore the camera to good health, but I worry that it will indeed have to go to the camera shop.

In the meantime, it turns out that the Puppy Nanny (aka Galen) has a small digital camera and so I am using that. While I do not intend to sound ungrateful, the borrowed camera is definitely not the quality of the usual one and the pictures reflect that. But how can a picture of a puppy be bad??

Happy Saturday! Things are well here at Puppy Central. All puppies have their eyes open and are walking around. They have started to walk away from wherever they are to go potty! And yesterday Galen was holding Ledger and he was wiggly and whining so Galen put him down, and Ledger promptly peed! Isn’t it amazing that at not even three weeks they can recognize when they need to potty? They walk just because they can now – they do not seem to require a destination but rather appear to do laps around the whelping box. And boy do they pee!

We have some hefty puppies! Rosebud has re-captured her spot as the heaviest puppy this morning – she weighs 68.9 ounces. This is just ahead of Sula, who is 67.25 ounces. Ledger and Madison are tied at 66 ounces, and Lolo – as usual – is bring up the rear, weighing in at 38.9 ounces.

Let me give you some perspective on these weights. In 18 days Lolo is over four times her birth weight and Rosebud is now 3.4 times her birth weight. So Lolo continues to have a better rate of gain than the others – she will catch up sometime around 12 months!

We still do some rotation of puppies. Halo likes to nurse them outside of the whelping box so I will put her on a fleece and then let four puppies nurse, adding the other four when the first are done. The first four always include Lolo but also any other puppy whose weight gain was low over the previous 12 hours. I think this is why Lolo continues to do well – she is in the nursing protection plan!

Today’s pictures reflect puppy life this morning. In one you have an excellent demonstration of the intensity of nursing. The two sleeping puppies that are side by side are Sula and Rosebud, and it is Lolo draped over Kinsey. The one puppy was licking and biting at Halo’s back leg; it is hard to tell but I still thought it was a fun picture to include. Finally, even though the new camera does strange things with eyeballs and so Halo looks possessed, I had to include the adorable shot of Madison interacting with Halo.

Have a wonderful weekend and consider planing a visit to see the puppies for yourselves! We look forward to seeing Cali, Kate and Armand (and Tiger) from Salt Lake City next weekend -- when can we expect you?