Week 8

First of all, I want to wish our February 23, 2013 litter a very happy 2nd birthday! This was Sandy's second and last litter and they were beautiful puppies!  It was also the most dramatic, exhausting, costly, scary, etc. learning experience we have had thus far!  Sandy was not meant to be a breeding dog.  This litter landed us in the E.R. vet clinic on Friday night, and an emergency C-section on a Sunday night.  It was our first and only experience in bottle feeding, which if you've never bottle fed 8 puppies round the clock you don't comprehend the exhaustion in it.  I'm tired just talking about it!  But again, those were some great puppies!!  Find them in the 2013 archives from March to April!  Beautiful!  I will never forget them!
If you weren't a fan of Finley River Retrievers back then, here's the link  to the birthday puppies!  
And here's the link to see the post about Sandy's C-Section...yes, I was there for it and took pictures.  

In the meantime, I had more pictures of the snow puppies I wanted to share.  They are irresistible!

It's a cruel world as a mama of lots of puppies.

Domestic puppies have inherited traits from their ancestors in the wild...
the pack instinct,
the hunting instinct,
and the hunting in packs instinct.

They use this on their mama.

It's like the 60 days of gestation and the past 7 weeks of nurturing them now mean nothing.

But it works every time.
Ask Annie how much she will miss her puppies...

Speaking of wild dog instincts, the girls think they're wolves of the tundra!

They flee across the snow like a free spirit stopping at nothing to survive!

Except then their feet get cold.
They get kind of tired of all the running,
and that Gator seat looks pretty inviting.

That rough and tough wolf stuff is for the birds.
They've never had to fight for anything to survive so why pretend?

So anyway, we're down to 11 puppies after the weekend.
We still have snow on the ground and they have grown accustomed to it.

They practice running through it too.

It builds up an appetite.  Because all 18 of them still trying to nurse on a mama who doesn't have much left, doesn't really hold them over.

They are friendly fellas!

This bush has provided entertainment for every litter we've had.  They chase each other around it.

So that's it.  This may be my last post of all of them in the snow because they are dwindling down every day.
I felt sorry for those leaving thinking they'd miss their siblings...til I saw the pictures their owners have sent with them in their state of the art beds or a human bed for that matter!