3 weeks in..

The little pinto beans of love, Maple's "leaves" are 3 1/2 weeks old now. This first three weeks, up until about two days ago has been pretty much a breeze.  Like my last Mama dog, Maple really seems to be trying her best to take care of them and keep them clean.  The problem is.. she just can't do it anymore. I mean, she' really, REALLY tries, but  Maple was so weak and sickly when she came to us. She had barely begun to recover when she gave birth to way more puppies than we thought she could have reasonably held in her tiny body. She's giving it her best shot, but with crap health to begin with, her energy is waning.  I'm feeding her 4-5 times a day, huge amounts with raw egg and liver and yogurt and all kinds of fatty things and.. you can still see her hip bones. All these extra calories seem to just be going straight to the milk production, but it's just becoming not enough. Put it this way, there are eight of them.  They all weigh between 1.5 and  3lbs. That means, collectively, they just swallow her right up. I mean, look at those little porkers.

Like I said, she does her best, but it's time now for me to help take over. She really needs to concentrate on just getting strong enough for heartworm treatment and putting on weight, and that's just not going to happen if she's having to expend all her energy towards feeding eight rabid badgers. So, we've started group feeding several times a day. Some of them are...taking better to it than others. 

Everyone seems pretty healthy so far, despite not coming from the healthiest of mamas. There's one little one that I am slightly worried about but I hesitate to jinx her by mentioning it here because I'm hoping I'm just completely mistaken about what I think might be happening with her. There's really not anything I can do  if it's true anyway (I think she might have some vision problems). So, for now, I'm just going with the more likely option: that I am wrong. 

They're really starting to move around now and play with each other. Mainly, they chew on each other's faces a lot. 

And they still sleep a lot. There's a lot of ridiculous sleeping up in this joint. (this is the same puppy in both pictures, by the way, he has a position and he sticks with it). 

Oh and we got our DNA tests back that showed pretty much what we suspected:  Dog Salad with Cocker Spaniel Dressing. Still, Dog Salad can end up pretty dang cute sometimes.