So Sunday night (or Monday morning) about midnight Zara would not settle down, usually she gets a dog bone about 10:30 or so and will pace and whine at Ken until he completes this ritual and then comes in to our bedroom and sleeps under the bench at the foot of our bed. So she is whining and panting and pacing like crazy - coming to my side of the bed and bumping me with her nose - this is not normal so I try to comfort her (she is due on Wednesday) and try to go back to sleep.
Did I mention ALL of my babies pretty much slept through the night? I am not good in the wee hours.
About 12:30 am I finally gave up and got out of bed figuring she must be starting labor - we get into the pool and I try to be supportive - really, I have only been on the prego side, not the supportive side, its harder than you think - she continues to pant and whine and pace.
After a couple of hours Fritz and I are laying in the living room trying to sleep and Zara is still pacing - then like magic she goes into my bedroom and under her bench and goes to sleep. Fritz said she was just faking us out and if we went to bed she would just start up again , but I wanted my bed. It's now 2:30am and I am really tired.
Monday morning she is back to panting and pacing - I kept a really good eye on her all day but she did not seem to be progressing - I googled it you know.
Finally at about 4pm I was starting to get a little worried, I did not want her to be wore out before the really important stuff, so I called the Vet. He said to bring her in and so Ken came home and we went to find out he really couldn't tell us if it was false labor or what. But he gave us some good pointers and I felt better for having taken her.
About 9:30 pm Brenn and I are working on her Grad announcements and in comes Zara to lay at my (really, on my) feet. I look down and see some blood - We are on...she is in labor and so we mobilize to the pool and try to get her to follow. She keeps going into Grandma's room and we keep calling her. At this point Grandma (thank goodness she has really good hearing) says something is making noise in her room - sure enough Zara dropped the first puppy behind Grandma's bed! She did clean it up and he squealed like crazy! So we grabbed the puppy and put it in the pool to nurse and spread out to see if she left any some where else then watched ....and watched...and waited....
Finally about 2 hours after the first one she delivered the next one and from there it ranged from about an hour to an hour and a half between puppies. Thank Heaven there were only 6 - as it was I was up until 4 am. Then I made Ken take over watching and then he had to irrigate at 5am anyway.
Its hard to know when they are done - but she did such a good job and my kids got to see what it was like, the boys were a little grossed out when she chewed off the cord and ate everything but hey that is nature (I am glad that was not required for humans!)
Zara is being a really good mom...I am not getting much sleep though, she really wants to sleep in our room but the pull of the puppies is pretty strong. Last night was the best so far, she spent most of the night in our room but got up to nurse the puppies when they got loud (are they ever loud) except for about 3 am, I had to get up and help her. She is really tired, she looks really tired. So do I!
The puppies have grown so much in just a few days. We have only named one "Handsome Rob" and yes we were watching the Italian Job. He is the only one who is dark, there are 2 blonde ones and 3 who look identical so Handsome Rob is the only one we can figure out for now.
I will post some pictures tomorrow.
3 comments:
What fun! When can my girls come visit?
I am so not a dog person so I'm highly impressed right now. I might have to bring the girlies for a visit sometime. They would love to see the puppies!
Hey! I thought we were first in line!
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