I wrote this blog post a few days ago, but was unable to post due to an emergency trip home to Arkansas this weekend.  I have an extremely ill family member who took a sharp turn for the worst on Friday.  Without going into details, we decided it was important to make long drive home for a short (I mean a few hours at most) visit.  We have arrived back in TX safe, though we are exhausted.  The pups weathered the trip like champs.  They didn’t poop once in the airline crate and we stopped several times to eat and potty on the drive.  It is 8 hours there and back, so you could say they are seasoned travelers at 4 weeks of age.

I had to cancel two visits for this weekend.  Hopefully I will be able to squeeze everyone in this next weekend, barring any farther need to go home.   If you can visit during the week, that would be great.  Just send me an email and let me know what will work and please bare with me if I have to cancel your visit last minute for another trip back home.

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Wow, can you believe it has already been 4 weeks?  I can’t.   Maybe it is the exhaustion, but time is flying by.  Jazz reminded me yesterday that it is TIME TO WEAN THE PUPPIES!!, and yes she did it in all caps and explanation points.  There are tiny teeth, sharp nails, and sleeping in the living room is for the birds!!  So here we are, moving from Jazz providing meals and clean up to me providing meals and clean up.   Because of the size of this litter, I have decided to increase the size of their pen.  Usually, with a litter of 4-6 pups I unstack a extra large airline crate, put paper in one side, bedding in the other, zip tie them together, put an ex-pen around and call it done.  I let them use that for a week until they are good at going to the potty side to potty and then increase their pen.  However, this litter is over twice the size of Zelda’s litter last year.  I could do two airline crates, but I do not want to split the litter into two groups.  They need to be together in my mind.

Here is a video of the move.

 

 

I’m going to be feeding them often, waking them up to go pee, playing with them in the ‘play’ area until they understand the difference.  Poodles are smart, it shouldn’t take them long.

~Becky