weight update

The first week in a puppy's life is the most critical.  Every little thing can affect them and so many things can go wrong.  They can so easily pick up an infection, they can have feeding problems, they're not yet able to regulate their own temperature so even a draft can kill them.  It's a stressful time for us under normal circumstances (whatever 'normal' is).

With the first litter, Neka had no complications and was an excellent mum and 6 of the 7 puppies were fine and thrived with little or no input from me.  That was a lucky break, though, because the 7th puppy had a tough start in life.  He was difficult to resuscitate, couldn't suck, and I had to hand-feed him every 2 hours for the first week and every 3-4 hours for the second week.  Round the clock.  That was hard, hard work, but I was able to do it because Neka and the other puppies needed so little from me.

With the second litter, again Neka did a great job, although it was a constant low-level concern for us that she keep enough milk flowing.  And we were also very fortunate that none of the puppies had any problems at all.  They were all strong, healthy and vigorous.  All nine of them.  So, that was the difficulty with that litter - the sheer volume of the workload made everything tough.  Much, much more cleaning and double everything else. 

With these puppies, this week has been a rollercoaster ride.  Some had some problems, some didn't.  When it comes to tiny puppies, every little thing affects their progress, and so they didn't necessarily follow the pattern of weight gain that we might have expected.  At their weigh-in this morning, Dino was the heaviest, of course.  And the poll winner was ... 2 Toes!  So, not a shock result, but she's had more than her fair share of problems this week and there was a day when Butterfly overtook her, but she caught up again when she started to feel better.

Here are their current weights compared to their birth weights. Because I like pictures, I was going to insert a chart illustrating their relative weight gains, but for some reason I can't get it to work like I used to in the old days.  I'll figure it out for later.

                  Birth   1Week

2 Toes        418      778

2-Tone        327      682

Grey Wolf   327      645

Dino           467      840

Butterfly     361      740

I've got a trickier poll for next week for you clever things who played it safe with your votes.  Watch this space.

Tomorrow I'll have the first week updates and new photos.  In the meantime, here are some puppies doing their baby Lapphund thing.

Grey Wolf










2-Tone









2-Tone Again (spends a lot of time on his back, this boy)

Someone found a nice spot for a snooze.  It's just typical of a Lappy to claim the highest place available, even if it is only a 1-inch book.







Just to prove how advanced he is, Dino is learning to read.