02.14.10

It’s about time for an update

Posted in News at 16:44 by nikki

Well, I don’t know what to write about there has been a bit going on but not much really. Just feedings all day and night and luckily the nightly feedings are down to one the past couple days. They seem to be fine for about 5 hours sometimes six during the night which is awesome. I’m looking forward to starting them on some food next week so the bottle feedings will no doubt be less frequent. I will say that I think Skella has been giving them a bit of milk herself lately because they often refuse their bottle after being on her teats and they look full afterwards. Poor Tryggur seems to have a belly ache most times after he’s finished drinking, he will drink until he practically bursts and we have to cut him off but most the time we don’t cut him off soon enough and he whines for the longest time and can’t get a comfy position to sleep. Don’t know what to do for him, tried rubbing his belly and of course he always gets burped after his bottle but none the less he often looks like a beached whale.

We thought he was whining to get out of the whelping box because he wouldn’t like to pee in the box, whenever we took him out he’d walk over to the paper on the floor and go there. So we moved them to the puppy play pen so they can leave the box to do their business (I can’t remember but I think it’s possibly earlier than our other litters). I remember the other litters trying to climb out of the whelping box but these ones didn’t do that, they weren’t big enough yet. So yes I think they got into the living room extra early. Skella seems to be happier with it this way too, it means she doesn’t have to be torn between being in the room with the puppies by herself or with us in the living room. I think part of Tryggur’s whining now is because he can’t walk on the slippery floor. I think he is going to be a bit like his mom and get frustrated rather than try to figure things out on his own.

The other pups are all doing great and they don’t whine much, are very determined and figure things out by themselves. Like how to climb in and out of the whelping box, it’s not high up but they get their feet stuck on one side and had to figure out how to push themselves over. Hard to explain, hehe Smart puppies no doubt about it.

Well, Rúnar is in Reykjavík today and I’m alone on Valentine’s day and tomorrow I’ll be alone on my birthday while he’s at work. Oh well, not that I wanted to celebrate my birthday anyway but it would have been nice to have a few hours together. We used most the day yesterday cleaning, moving the puppies and I got to sleep. I had a bad night the night before and the pups would not drink so didn’t get much sleep and Rúnar got up around 8 and took over so I could go to bed. Slept half the day of course or until 2 p.m. so there wasn’t much of the day left to do anything special.

I’m having trouble with the fact that people always seem to call when I’m feeding the puppies (half the time they dilly dally so much that it takes me an hour to feed them all) or clipping their nails or doing something else that I can’t just put down and answer. Hopefully my friends understand, I know it sounds strange that I should be so busy with a litter of puppies because most people don’t have to worry about them at all for the first few weeks. We definitely did not get our “resting period” with this litter and now the fun begins. Time to teach them stuff and unfortunately the play pen gets so much more dirty than just the whelping box so it’s time to have the mop on hand. Seems when it’s not something going on with the puppies then I have to take care of the older dogs…never ending story.

Took a bunch more photos and put them in the album and tomorrow I’ll start a new album already. It is very worrying that the market is so slow these days, I really wanted to try to find homes in Iceland so that the owner’s could come and visit them a bit the last few weeks they are here but time is really flying and oddly enough when I didn’t have a litter then no one else had one either and so as soon as we decide to try again and have one then every body and their uncle has a litter at the same time. Unbelievable the amount of puppies available or on the way these days. Not just our breed either.

Thought this was just too cute, little Tumi is such a fun character already one of my favourites.

Klói likes the new arrangements, means he can keep a close eye on his offspring and make sure they behave themselves.

Birta got to help Skella as soon as they came out to the living room. For some reason Birta and Skella have always been pals, I think they are alot alike and understand each other well.

This little girl is making it impossible not to fall in love with her! I’m so wondering if I should change her name to Tásla Birta.

My allergies have been bad, sneezing, runny nose and even had an mild asthma attack yesterday morning. Don’t know if it’s because of the pups, the stress for lack of sleep or the fact that I found green and white fuzzy mold growing in the window sill behind the blinds the day before, seems the window had some condensation and was closed off by the blinds so when I decided to open the window I got this shock. I’m allergic to mildew and that could very well be why I’ve always felt a bit “stuffed up” in that room. Hopefully it’ll not come back, we made sure the blinds don’t go all they way down to the sill any more. Eczema is also back and I blame that on washing my hands all the time, this bottle feeding means I have to wash them even more than I did with other litters. Oh the joys of having dog allergies and a love of breeding! I’m thinking Rúnar was probably right that having a dishwasher is a MUST for me, didn’t think I’d ever admit it but I had no eczema while we had it and I do miss having one.

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02.10.10

Heartbreakers

Posted in News at 15:40 by nikki

Well, what can I say things are going well and there are a couple (okay ALL) that are just too cute for their own good. I’m totally in love with little girl Tásla I figured out today that she reminds me of her grandma Birta Freyja! Look at that sweet face.

I did add a new photo album at the right! Enjoy

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02.06.10

They’ve all grown like weeds

Posted in News at 02:31 by nikki

Well, they are all doubled now and some don’t have far to triple. I’ve added some more photos in the Week 2 album.

Took Skella in to the vets (not a student vet this time) today and apart from the fact that she had a slight fever they couldn’t see anything although from all the info we gave them about how she is acting and the bleeding (of course she didn’t bleed while she was there) they think that quite possibly there was some damage to the uterus and most likely from the shots she got. So they told us to keep a close eye on her and sent Rúnar home (I was at home with the puppies) with some antibiotics but said NOT to give them unless we felt she needed them. They are good and careful that way, don’t give those drugs like candy because it’s so easy to make the body resistant to the antibiotics as so often happens with humans. They feel that we might have to spay her but insisted it not be done if not totally necessary until after the pups are gone. They would rather she be able to care for her pups without extra stress or problems from surgery. Which I’m so totally in agreement.

For the great news. They are starting to open their eyes, Tásla has one eye open now at the 2 a.m. feeding and they are all so big Aron is already 820 grams and he is drinking around 50 ml all by himself! Amazing how quickly they grow without you really actually noticing even though we weigh them many times a day it still comes as a great surprise when they are actually that big already.

The other dogs got to see the puppies while Skella was at the vet’s today and Birta seemed to realize that she was a grandma. If was a bit funny, she sniffed one of the puppies and then went and sniffed Klói’s butt. I wonder if there is a similar family smell to dogs?! I imagine so.

Well, I better get to bed for a few hours before they wake up again wanting more. A couple cute photos taken tonight of the other love bugs in the house. Rúnar has been taking the feedings in the evenings and half the weekends. These guys are feeling a bit left out most of the time so they grab any moment they can with Daddy! Frigg and Hófi got to go to the store with us yesterday and got to run on the way home but it was SO cold.

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02.04.10

First to double!

Posted in News at 01:21 by nikki

Yay, tonight little Tumi has doubled his birthweight. I can see from the numbers that the others will most likely be doubled by tomorrow night and perhaps the first born bitch Tásla the next day because she is gaining slower than the rest. She likes to play with the bottle and is not as pushy as the others. The two black ones are growing so much faster but they were also the heaviest born so I think it is all going very evenly. They are getting so big that in a couple days it will be hard to hold them while giving them the bottle.

Rúnar has been so helpful this week and has been busy all evening after he gets home so that I can both rest and do other things like mop the floors, do the dishes, make supper etc. They still seem to want their food every couple hours so even though we have tried to spread out the time a bit we’ve gotten up to about 3 hours at the most and then we hear them with their little Mogwai calls and you can hear sucking noises and that means we have to get in their quickly to stop the poor males getting their privates injured. Hehe

Skella has had some extra bleeding the past few days and we are concerned about her. She did have a double dose of oxytosin and I know that can have side effects although the student vet said it was safe. I know of a bitch in Norway who bled to death after a litter because of too much of the drug so, true to myself as always, I’m worrying. I know it’s probably nothing but we called the vet tonight to ask (the same vet that came to our house) and he said that possibly she has a ruptured blood vessel or a vein leaking and that if we want we can bring her in tomorrow for a check-up if we don’t see any difference in the colour or amount of the blood. It’s not really bleeding excessively but enough that we know that our other females have not bled like that after a litter and the blood is so clean coloured not like the typical left over stuff that they rid their bodies of.

She is being a great mom though, cares for them so well and cleans them so we don’t have to worry about any of that. They are drinking a bit from her now because she seems to have gotten some milk just not all that much and of course that can partly be because we are feeding them and she doesn’t have to produce more but we have also found a knot in one of the back teats that we have been trying to massage and see if it will go away.

We got these adorable photos of Tryggur Aron drinking and I just have to share. He started out with a vengeance like he always does, drinks himself silly then he gets all OOOOh I drank too much and lastly he refuses the bottle. He is the cutest and they all remind me so much of Klói’s character. Speaking of Klói he has been able to come see his puppies a couple times and is quite fascinated by them still.

I am so happy with these little puppies, they are so sweet and we have already started some “training”, both scent training and environmental enrichment like different textures. I have not done the Early Neurological Stimulation on them and will not do it with bottle fed pups. They get way too much handling as it is and I also think that because the program was originally developed for kennel dogs that it may be putting some of our pups over the threshold and causing more stress and reactivity than they need to have. I remember thinking this last time and decided that I would not do the exercises with Raggi and Rún. I will admit that through the years the more I learn about dogs, clicker training (operant conditioning), stress and calming signals I have been a bit more cautious as to how I want to raise my puppies and I am thinking that environmental enrichment to build up confidence from the start is probably “safer” in terms of not overdoing the physical stressing. Since it does seem to matter how well each individual dog will cope with the stress. I’ve had dogs in the same litter be totally different even though they all got the same exercises as puppies but I do know that the homes they go into make so much of a difference and no stress exercises will change that! Enrichment to the environment and environmental training will.

I’d done the ENS for years on all my litters (can’t remember when I started it…2001 I believe) and I even advocated it to others and was asked to write an article in the kennel club magazine here because I believed it was an important factor of raising strong puppies at the time. However I have to admit that the easiest most confident, calm and collected puppies I’ve ever had are Raggi and Rún. Whether it is because there were only two of them (I will admit I didn’t spend much more time with them than I have any other puppy because at the time I didn’t have too much spare time to even take them for environmental training). While they were here with us they were so easy to get along with, never any stressing or over the top behaviour, and they seem to be very well balanced individuals from what I’ve heard and excel at obedience work. I also often wonder if the stress exercises caused the cancer to develop in a few of my GSP’s (all had different types of cancer but at least one was a stress induced fast growing cancer!). And so I’m just experimenting with how these puppies will turn out, now of course it won’t be a fair experiment because they are bottlefed and get lots of handling anyway.

I have no worries that they will be great family pets because most breeders I know do not do the ENS exercises but their puppies are very easy to settle in normal situations as well as stressful ones. Like I say I think I’m going to look at this whole puppy raising thing in a different way and we are developing a puppy enrichment class for our school that I’m really looking forward to starting. All the puppies that stay here in Iceland out of this litter will get a free course in clicker training as well as what we are going to call “preparation for the world” puppy class.

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01.31.10

They have names

Posted in News at 01:28 by nikki

So here are the little angels. Photos taken today and they are starting their 6th day of life (the photos were taken late this evening). I guess you can say they are 5 days old…I never know exactly how to count that.

Well actually I’m feeling horrible right now, have to lay down at least until the next feeding. I have such bad shoulders and back from crouching over the puppies on the floor, shouldn’t be on the computer. Getting dizzy so I’ll just add the photos and not write too much.

The one thing I will say though is that the puppy’s second names are the names of some of our best handball players that were playing while they were being born. Iceland is going to be competing for the bronze medal I believe tomorrow or Monday and so we are very proud of our team, it’s the same team that won the silver at the Olympics and got the medal of honour from the president in Iceland. We love our handball. Hehe Well, usually I don’t watch it only if it’s something like this and then I think it’s so exciting! The girls each got half of the name of our best goalie (Björgvin) because when used on their own split up then they are girl’s names.

First born girl: Töfra Tásla Björg (Tásla is a word used by children for toe…she has her daddy’s dewclaws! Björg is a girl’s name and means rescue but it is also the first part of the man’s name Björgvin) Born: 14:25 / 245 grams

Second born also a girl: Töfra Tígla Vina (Tígla is a word for diamonds (in cards) or rhombus, Vina is a girl’s name but also means friend and is the second part of the man’s name Björgvin) Born: 17:15 / 310 grams

Third puppy is a huge boy: Töfra Tryggur Aron (Tryggur means faithful) Born: 17:20 / 335 grams

He’s had a cut on his paw that is healing (you can see a little dark spot on his foot). I think the vet might have accidentally cut him with the scissors when she cut his cord. I have been wondering about how it happened and that’s all I can think of because it was a clean shallow cut almost like a scrape. He is extremely strong and eats like an ox!