Puppies Galore

I realize there’s no need to apologize for the delay in getting this post up: all of you know what we’ve been up against these past couple of months (“the horror! the horror!”), and even many years from now I doubt we’ll find the gap mysterious.  It was our Season of the Pups, and the memory of it will surely follow the four of us to the end of our days.

So here, at long last, but without apology, is the August-September blog.  You will not be surprised to find it features very little of its primary subjects.  I am also unapologetic about that, because I know its primary subjects will in the future be glad to have these weeks so well chronicled.

So, Sherman, kindly set the Wayback Machine to July 28 of this year, and let’s have a look at Didi.

The pregnancy had been pretty normal, this time around, and toward the end Didi was nesting out in the yard: digging first a big birthing pit, and then, on the very last days of her pregnancy, also a backup birthing pit right beside it.  I was worried about the compulsive behavior, then read online that Goldens do this all the time: they want that backup pit, apparently, in case something goes wrong with the main pit.

Here she is occupying the backup pit, presumably under the assumption she’ll be birthing her litter out there.  Silly dog!

And here she is around ten o’clock on the morning of the big day…

And here she is about an hour and a half later.

Two hours passed after the water broke at about 14:00, no puppies had been born, so the vet suggested we bring her over for a checkup.

Good thing we did, because the first pup had lodged itself in such a way that it was blocking the birth canal and needed a little help being born.

And at 17:41, the first little pup made his appearance.  Have a look at Whitey, aka Limey, aka Olaf.

He went right to work.  Look how tiny!

Twenty-three minutes later, at 18:04, he was joined by brother Greenie, aka Arthur.

Thirteen minutes later, at 16:17, along came Red, aka Pinkie, aka Hollie:

And around this point, we were joined at the vets’ office by Maddie.

She was there at 18:45 when Blue, aka Buster, aka Otto showed up.

There are scores of adorable pictures of puppies ahead, but I’d like the permanent record to record some evidence of just how “adorable” they were entering the world: her is a picture of Gold, aka Crimson, aka Vega, mere seconds after her 19:19 birth.

So as you can see by the lack of a slimy skeleton-rat in the photo below, they get cleaned up pretty quickly — partly by Didi’s licking them clean, partly by the “nursewife” with a towel.

At 20:16 the quintet became a sextet with the arrival of Gray, aka Blackie, aka Samson.

There was one sad note during all this: a last little pup was born at 21:00, a female, but the she wasn’t breathing and couldn’t be resuscitated.  And that was the end of it (despite a brief scare that evening when we feared yet another pup had not been birthed).

You can see their average weight was around 470g — just a little over a pound — and the combined weight of the surviving pups was 2.8 kg, or about six pounds (obviously).  The average pup would weigh that much just one week later!

It was quite late at night by the time the six little pups and their mother were settled in for the night at home.

I marvel in retrospect at how tiny they are at this point.

And how strange looking!  I mean, here’s one of the pups at an age of about 24 hours, and it barely even looks like a dog to me.  And yet, at the time we thought they were all unbearably cute!

…and I guess, in their way, they were.

Cute… and hungry.  And blind, and deaf, and with no sense of smell, and not even very good at dragging themselves around.

But they always managed to find their way to their meals.

At 48 hours they were still cute little aliens.

…who sometimes bore a creepy resemblance to cornish game hens.

They really loved the space under the protective railing of their box.  It was their preferred spot for sleeping, and as they got older it became a kind of jungle gym they enjoyed climbing around (and getting stuck on).

Ah!  They’re now wearing their more familiar colors (it was a little jarring for me to see those first-day yarn collars in colors like white, gold, and gray).

How quickly can you count all six?

That became second-nature to us very quickly, counting to six.  You might be sitting in the living room reading or watching television, and you’d notice some other member of the household wandering over to the box, peering in, and going, “One, two, three, four, five… five… oh, six, there you are!”

It became so reflexive, in fact, that shortly after the first pup was picked up and taken away by its new owner, I panicked because I had taken inventory and stalled on five.

“Where’s six?” I called out frantically, “where’s six?”

“We only have five now,” Maddie reminded me.

Such was the force of habit within me.

We all loved taking time “in the box.”

We weighed the pups once a day.  We did this by setting them into an aluminum mixing bowl on our kitchen scale.

That’s an astonishing picture to me, now: they outgrew the bowl very quickly, so that we had to switch to a big wicker basket, and by the time they were about 6½ weeks old they were impossible to weigh on the kitchen scale so we had to abandon weighing them altogether.  (I just now saw that Arthur was weighed by his new owners today at 10 kilos — 22 pounds!)

I love pictures like this next one where you can clearly see all six pups and the colored collars that identify them.

And closeups like this, for the same reason.

Box time for Trine:

It was enormously stressful having these fuzzy little invaders in our home, obviously, but it was also remarkably destressing to take some time in the box with them.  Few things soothe the soul like a litter of puppies.

And really, a single one will do in a pinch.

(And as a father, the sight of a happy daughter with a happy puppy is even more destressing.)

Here they are at the ripe old age of eight days — each of them now weighing as much as the whole litter had a week ago.  You can see the size difference.

This next picture is iconic to me, because it’s what we used as the group page header image on the puppy’s Facebook group — the group none of you were invited to, alas, because it was established strictly for the future owners and we had to assure them as much privacy as possible.

The group is still live, and we get a lot of nice updates on how the pups are faring (it is, for example, how I know that Arthur broke the 10 kilo barrier today).

I’m not going to comment on every picture, because some are obviously just being included because OHMYGODHOWCUTEISTHAT?!, and I would lose all respect for myself if I said such things too often.

The whole thing was so exhausting to poor Didi — who didn’t stop panting for the first 4-5 weeks of nursing — that I was able to get a picture of her not even raising an eyebrow as one of the cats went dipping into her food bowl.

August 10, and eyes begin to open!

Open eyes take a while to adjust, but by August 12 they seem to have realized, “Hey, wait a minute, we’re in a box!  There’s a whole world out there!…”

I should mention that up until now the girls had still been on summer vacation, although the last week had been committed mostly to handball camp.

August 12 was Maddie’s first day of fifth grade and Molli’s first day of ninth.

This was Maddie’s first year at Atheneskolen, so this was her first first day of school there.  Because it’s in Buddinge, roughly halfway between Værløse and Copenhagen, she has to ride her bike to the train station, take the train to Buddinge, and then a bus to within about a hundred meters of her school.

To be sure she could handle the commute, I accompanied her on the first day of school, and Trine did on the second.  So I got to snap a pic of her arrival in her classroom on her first day at Atheneskolen.

And by now the plump little pups were refusing to lie still in the mixing bowl, so here’s Vega in the basket we had to start using for daily weigh-ins.

And her’s the new fifth-grader getting some quality box time.

They’re looking a little more puppy like now (we’re still on August 12).

And here’s a shot from the 13th.

You may notice in the photo below that Trine’s cleaning something up while Molli enjoys a little box time.  What she’s cleaning is a little tiny puppy poop.  Up until this point Didi (or the pups themselves) had been pretty good about cleaning them up themselves — by eating them!  But they were beginning to get substantial enough that Didi was losing interest, and the puppies were as likely to roll around in the poo as they were to “clean” it.

We’re up to August 16 now.

August 17th:

And it’s now, at the age of about 19 days, that playfulness begins to appear.  Their favorite game, their first game, is “how much of my sibling’s head can I fit in my mouth?”

Meanwhile, I’ve been taking a hunting course with Mads and his daughter Freja. 

We made a deal that we’d get pictures of each other shooting, but Mads got distracted and didn’t get a shot of me at the range, so here’s a shot of him missing a clay pigeon.  I hit mine with surprising accuracy this first day on the range, but don’t worry — I missed almost all of my targets on the second day, a couple of weeks later.

We’re up to August 18, so the dogs are 20 days old now.

There were no pictures at all of me with the pups, so I had to resort to puppy selfies.

We realized early on that one pup in particular seemed to be hitting her developmental markers first among the little: Pinkie, aka Hollie.  Here she is sitting up in an almost normal dog sitting position, the first pup to do so.

We introduced toys to the box, and they were a big hit.

Compare the picture above (or below) to pictures way above to get a sense of how quickly these pups were growing. 

The picture above is from August 19.  If you’ve retained some elementary math skills you’ll realize that’s their three-week birthday, and week three meant it was time to introduce solid food.  We began with torskerogn (shad roe) mixed with A38 (buttermilk yogurt).  They were receptive.

We also began introducing them to more and more life outside the box… including the cats who’d been slinking around them for weeks.

And feeding them outside the box wasn’t just a solid food thing.

As a result, the box was losing some of its appeal.  We began to experience regular attempts at jailbreaks.

And though we typically fed them one at a time, in groups of three, sometimes we were in a hurry and gave them one big bowl to share.

…which was slightly chaotic, but only marginally moreso than when they each got a little silver serving dish of their own.

Clearly they needed time out of the box, now — they took it even when it wasn’t offered them — so we had to make some adjustments.

These adjustments only enabled a whole new world of jailbreaks.

But see how puppyish they’re looking by August 22!

One pup, and only one, seemed to prefer the “Superman” posture when lying down.  (Didi liked to lay like this frequently when she was a puppy.)

Didi wasn’t entirely the selfless mother: here she’s letting one of the pups lap at her food bowl, but she was always quick to discourage them with a snarl when she felt her generosity was being abused.

The playfulness just kept increasing: here’s a great game of tug-og-war:

This was how we fed them individually while acclimatizing them to solid food: three in a row, each with their own dish, facing in alternate directions to avoid the “I think my sibling’s food looks better” problem.

Solid food had one immediate downside: solids in, solids out!

And it was about this time we realized the pups had a literal taste for literature, which would require a rethinking of our living room shelves.

August 24, and you can see we’ve provided a little stepping stone to help them in and out of the box (not that the idiots can figure out how to use it: we frequently have to help a pup whose become stranded dangling over the barrier).

August 24 was also the date of ex-step-cousin Joachim’s 50th birthday party.

August 25 and they just keep getting bigger.

And on the brink of 4 weeks old, the literature tells us they now have metabolisms up to the task of handling outdoor temperatures.

They are now very puppylike in appearance and behavior.

And having acquired a taste for the outdoors, they pine for it…

August 27, and we make the fateful decision to get them out of the box for good and let them overnight in the foyer and hallway.

(“Can you remember to get a picture of me this time, Mads?” “No problem.” “Great.” … “Did you get any good pics?” “Oh, man, Freja was shooting, I forgot!”  Sigh.)

August 28 we held a big open house for all the future owners.  Not all could attend, but most could, and it was just one big Puppy-O-Rama.

…which exhausted the poor little beasts.

By now (August 29) it had become too difficult to feed them individually.  We went to the trough method.

They were getting messier, more rambunctious, louder, wilder — all of which was only bearable because they were become too adorable to hate.

First road trip for these two!

It was just a quick errand, and they took it pretty well.

Meanwhile, we were giving them more and more time outdoors.

Including meals.

And Didi was by now playing with them quite frequently.

Trine picked up a little HabiTrail-type toy for the pups, and they loved it.

…even though they were already turning pretty much everything into a toy.

And were beginning to get much more adventurous within the house.

…a house that took a cloudburst on the last day of August to remind us had some issues that needed tending to…

September 1, so the pups are on the brink of completing their fifth full week of life, and are now outgrowing the basket…

They’re really getting big.

And closing in on Category 5 cuteness.

And running absolutely amok every time they’re given the chance.

…oh, hell, they blew right through Category 5….

Maggie from down the street dropped by for a visit.

We’re up to September 6.  It’s a Friday, and time for the big Sommerfest at Atheneskolen.

(No idea why she looks unhappy: she herself, observing this photo as I was selecting the pics for this blog, asked, “Why am I so unhappy?  That was so fun!” So we’ll chalk it up to the sun in her eyes or something.)

Home made apple juice: zillions of apples squeezed to pulp, then the pulp drained for juice.

And what’s this?  A commotion is starting.  Who doesn’t love commotion!

…the commotion turns out to be some kind of old Viking dance, and Mormor joins in with Maddie.

Maddie tried her luck at the Spinning Wheel, which was the most complicated one I’d ever seen.  There were letters from A to P, and each letter had numbers 1 to 8, and you had to pick a letter and a number, and you could get a prize for hitting the letter or the number, or a grand prize for hitting both.

Standoff:

With the basket failing us, I gave the bowl another try.  Note this is the same bowl you saw above, and possibly the same pup.

I tried to see what the pups would make of a little bit of pig’s ear, usually reserved for Didi.  They were intrigued, but neither made an effort to eat it.  And once it was clear they’d lost interest, Didi swooped in and ate it in a single bite.

Hey, it’s September 8!  I’d been invited to a “citizenship day” celebration at parliament for all Danes who’d received their citizenship in 2018.

The four of us made our way to Christiansborg…

Where our “party” begain with a ten-minute line in the courtyard.

After which we were admitted into a large tent.  You can’t see at this size, but the (new) Prime Minister was up front, by the stage, glad-handing the public as we filed in.

I was sure there wouldn’t be any pictures of me on my day unless I took some myself, so here I am getting a selfie of myself.

Molli wasn’t super-excited to be there.

Maddie and Trine got into the spirit, though.

We heard a little speech or two in the tent before being entertained with a lot of songs, dancing, and other little performances.  Our Emcee was Hans Christian Andersen.

The crowd went wild!

It’s not a great shot, but I like Maddie’s reaction to her mothers’ enthusiasm.

(But the crowd really did go wild.)

After the entertainments in the tent, we were granted an open house in Christiansborg.  There was a line for that, too.

We were very, very lucky in that we got a member of parliament to personally escort our family around on a guided tour, and he even took this picture of us in front of the Prime Minister’s office.  This is the Danish equivalent of our family standing in front of the door to the Oval Office.

And here’s the gracious MP who showed us around, Niels Flemming Hansen.

Even after Flemming’s tour (I’m surprised to see I didn’t get any pictures of his own office) we enjoyed wandering around the parliamentary building.  Here we are in Parliament itself… in this case, the analog would be to one of the Congressional houses (Denmark is unicameral).

The first constitutional document in Danish history dates to 1241 A.D., and although the original no longer exists, a copy from about 1300 does.  (Its official name is “The Jutland Act of 1241,” if you want to look it up online.)

Sorry it’s sideways!

There is also the Coronation Charter from 1483:

And, of course, Grundloven from 1849… the current Constitution of Denmark.

The stairs won’t mean much to most of you, but they’re something you often see on television: politicians being cornered by the media on the stairs as they come into or head out of session.

…And of course, I love getting shots of the family (even bad ones like this) that feature the spire of Nikolaikirke, for reasons I doubt I have to elucidate.

And now… retournons a nos chiots!

Each of us found it sometimes very pleasurable to let the puppies run amok all over us.  We called it having a “puppy bath.”  Here is Maddie enjoying a smallish one on September 9.

And here is our final shot of this post: a puppy watching in confusion as I descend the basement stairs…

This was a long post and I’m pressed for time, so I’m not going to give it an editorial once-over as I usually do, so please forgive any typos or inaccuracies. 

We’re only up to September 9, so the next blog post will include not only the final weeks of the puppy “idyll,” but will probably also include our forthcoming vacation in Portugal.  It will therefore probably also be long and therefore slow to appear.  But it shall appear, because CHRONICLE ALL THE THINGS!


See you in late October!