Tough Few Days

Well my Darci (chihuahua) had her pups on Saturday afternoon. The first one was stillborn, a boy that looked EXACTLY like Ty... the second was a TINY black girl and then a HUGE fawn boy (well he was more than twice the size of his sister!) The last two were born so close together that the boy came out before the afterbirth for the girl... unfortunately weighing in at 1.5 ounces our little girl was not very strong and although we helped her nurse and even bought supplement to feed her, she did not make it past 36 hours. Darci is understandably pretty intense about her remaining pup but I insist on weighing him several times a day and he is gaining each time so all seems well there. Darci herself was trembling pretty bad and panting late Sunday night, we ended up at the animal ER at 1am and didn't get home until 3am but they couldn't find anything bad wrong, the things they checked were all ok, but they did say she needed to poop and they "helped" her with that. X-ray at the regular vet in the morning ruled out an undelivered pup and there is no fever or unusual discharge so they don't believe she retained any birthing material either. At this point I am thinking that constipation is her problem, so we are working on that. She is not eating real well which worries me a bit but of course we can always tempt her with people food {sigh}.

As a consequence of not much sleep for several days I crashed yesterday, took off work early, was home and in bed by 4pm and slept almost the whole night through except for about an hour around 9pm when I woke up hungry and ate a couple of apples and some Amish peanut butter. I slept so hard I had a bad headache but that's finally almost gone too. I'm really looking forward to hitting my pillow again shortly here... My apologies to my blogger friends, I have not been able to keep up with anyone (including my own blog) but I hope to get back to it soon!

One good result of all the worry over the pups is I didn't eat regularly and this morning the scale said a new all-time low of 184.8 so I broke that 185 barrier... I am sure it will fluctuate back up a bit as it has been fluctuating a couple of pounds either way for a couple of weeks... but maintaining pretty much 186-187 or so.

And our other chihuahua Vada looks like she is about to BURST! Her belly is so tight, and I love to lay my hand on it and feel the pups moving inside - they are really active the last couple of days. Had her checked at the vet too and they said it should be within the week... we are praying for a better result with her litter. It's hard to deal with but the vet said that with the dogs this small, they are actually surprised if they DON'T lose at least one pup. My experience is with bigger dogs - and even Hannah was over 10 pounds and her pups were small but not tiny.

Well good night all.