Slow Down, Gym Shoe!

Quick Updates (Including a Puppy Update!)

I don't have a whole lot new to post... Jimmy hasn't been working, so I haven't been watching the kids a whole lot lately. Its been kind of a break for me, I guess, but kinda stressfull. Plus I really miss our regular routines of getting out of the house each day. By next week I think I'll just take the kids out anyway just to give Jimmy a break during the day. Today though I came back to my mom's house to take care of some bidness! ;)
Anyways, not much new! The kids are all still enjoying the new house! We've been having a lot of family gatherings... Tigerlily and her parents have been coming over just about every weekend, sometimes spending the night! Little Bear and Tigerlily fight like sisters, but I think it is very cool for the kids to be surrounded by family members like that! I enjoy it, myself!
Here's a picture I took this morning of Little Bear and Pufferfish playing around in the back room! They're both getting so huge, aren't they?

Also, Clover and the puppies are staying at our house now! They are going to be able to go to their new homes in about a week. As you can see, they can handle solid food now, and are being weaned from Clover's milk! Clover is really relieved about that... The bigger they get, the more it hurts her to feed them. They have sharp little teeth! Now, to get her to feed them, we have to sit with her and pet her the whole time to keep her calm!
They are so funny though! They're definitely more social now, and they want to spend time with humans. Jimmy built a large box for them to hang out in most of the time, so that they're not wandering around in the house peeing and pooping on stuff and getting lost and what have ya. So they're in the box, which is plenty large enough for them all to walk around in, play in, etc. But when a person walks by, they'll all start jumping up and whimpering, like, "Take me out and pet me!" In order to take them all out, you have to have at least two people willing to help, because the puppies run amok  everywhere and constantly pee and poop! But they are a lot of fun!
Want to meet them, one by one? Start with the black one and go clockwise around the feeding circle!
1. Luna, aka Midnight. (Sarah named her Luna, but Little Bear named her Midnight, which, confusingly enough, is also the name of Tigerlily's family's cat!) Lunais the one who we thought wouldn't make it because she wasn't gaining weight, but as you can see she has caught up! She's still the tiniest. Her face is like a little teddybear! She loves to be cuddled, but she also loves to scrap with her brothers and sisters! Every time I see her, she's wrestling with one of them!
2. Buttered Toast. He's just a little roll of butter running around! He'didn't start out as social as the other ones, but he definitely loves attention and hugs!
3. Herbert, aka Big Guy. (Sarah named him Herbert originally, but Little Bear calls him Big Guy!) This puppy is the hugest one, way bigger than his brothers and sisters! He thinks he's the leader of the pack! He's very cuddly though and always wants to be the first to be taken out and petted! He's also the first one who has ran into the kitchen and started eating Clover's grown-up dog food! He says, "I'm way past that mashed up puppy chow stuff!"
4. Sherbert. She's a sweet little girl who likes to wrestle! She's also a good growler! When her brothers and sisters pick on her, she snarls and snaps at them! She loves belly rubs!
5. Ronnie, aka Guinness. (Megan originally named him Ronnie, but Tigerlily's family, who is going to take him, have named him Guinness!) He's one of the most spoiled puppies of the bunch! Whenever we take them out to play, he's the first one trying to run into the carpeted rooms where puppies are not allowed to go! Also, last night after all the puppies went to sleep, Guinness stayed up and whined and cried until I took him out and let him sleep with me. He might get to go home a little earlier than the others! 6. Doctor, aka Shakers! (Sarah and I named him Doctor, but Becca, who is taking him, has named him Shakers!) He's one of the puppies I fell in love with the earliest... definitely one of the most cuddly! I love his cute little chihuahua face!
7. Pepper, aka TBA! (She's the one we're keeping, but we haven't given her a new name yet for some reason!) (Get it? The two little chihuahua twins are Doctor and Pepper?) She's tiny and cuddly, and is really good friends with Luna! They're the two little girls who are always playing and cuddling together! Pepper is sweet and playful and not too whiny, at least not yet! She loves to be cuddled!

They are so sweet, aren't they? I love watching them chow down all their food!

Anyway, look for more updates and news later in the week! Thanks for reading!

Random Odds And Ends

Here's a post full of totally random odds and ends that I thought I'd slap together and refer to as a blog entry! Enjoy!

Puppy Update
Last week I posted about the new puppies in our family! The puppies are now a week old, and here are a few updates.
If you commented on my last post about the puppies, I probably replied and told you that the smallest and youngest puppy, who we called Muffin, died two days after her birth. It was so sad and we were broken-hearted about it, after working so hard to revive that little one!
Now, there seems to be another runt in the group. Luna, the entirely black puppy, hasn't seemed to gain any weight since her birth. The other puppies have doubled in size, but not Luna! Its weird, because she was always the one who nursed the most. The others would nurse for a while and then wander away, but Luna was always there, nursing! She just hasn't gotten any bigger. Now, since she's tiny, the other puppies shove her out of the way and don't let her nurse. Diana's mom, who has been keeping Clover and the puppies at her house since she has experience with newborn puppies and doesn't have any toddlers running around her house on a daily basis, has been trying to remedy this by giving Luna time alone with Clover to nurse before any of the other puppies do. This way nobody else can shove Luna out of the way, and the first part of the milk from each nursing session is supposed to have the most vitamins. But Clover doesn't have much patience for Luna and tries to walk away from her. Luna cries all the time, too, just like Muffin did! I really hope she's going to be okay!!!
The story of Luna's birth is that she was the third puppy born, but she came so shortly before the fourth puppy, that she didn't get much time with Clover. Clover gave Luna a few licks, and then right away started contractions again, so poor Luna was whisked away to my pocket until after the fourth one had been pushed out! Luna was also the most surprising one, since Diana's mom had never had a dog who'd given birth to a black puppy before!
As for the other puppies, they're doing great. buttered Toast is the biggest, but all of the others have also doubled in size and weight! They still haven't opened their eyes or anything. Another cool piece of news is that Tigerlily's family is probably going to be taking Ronnie, the spotted puppy who looks kind of like Mijo. Everyone loves Ronnie because of his spots, so we're all happy that he's going to get to stay in our family!
Here are a few recent puppy pictures!

This picture is sort of blurry, but you can see that Luna is much smaller and skinnier than her littermates!

Clover feeding the puppies. You can see Luna on the end of the row, being wedged out of the way by her brothers and sisters!

I just included this picture because its so cute!!!

Now for a picture of Pufferfish! I took a picture of her because she had a big Kool-Aid smile that made her look like the Joker! In a related story, all of the kids were drinking Kool-Aid that day, and I warned them that they should only drink Kool-Aid outside, because if they drank it indoors, Kool-Aid would bust through the wall yelling, "Oh yeah!" Of course the kids ran into the garage to try it. But the Kool-Aid man never came! Later, I found out why... they were actually drinking Mix-Aid, a generic version of Kool-Aid!
(By the way, thats Jamaya's hand holding Pufferfish's head still so the picture wouldn't turn out blury!)

Quotable moment, brought to you by Little Bear.
Usually when we go to a store, I make Pufferfish ride in the cart no matter what. Little Bear can choose in our out of the cart, but she has to stick with her choice, or they'll both be in and out of the cart the whole time!
Anyway, on a recent trip to Hobby Lobby, Little Bear was in the back of the cart. I turned away for a moment, and when I looked back, Little Bear was standing next to the cart!
Me: "Little Bear, I told you not to climb out of the cart!"
Little Bear: "i didn't climb. I clamored!"
I guess I'll have to be more specific next time!
 
Household Tip
For reasons I can no longer recall, I bought some flower wall stickers at the Dollar Store and let the kids stick them on the floor. I thought they'd peel off easily like the alphabet ones the girls have in their room, but instead, they stuck fast to the floor like regular stickers! But the good news is, I learned a fool proof and mostly chemical-free way to get stickers off of the floor (or the wall, or glass, or wherever!) Here's what you do.

1. Spray the sticker with Windex or another glass cleaner. Saturate the sticker and let it soak.
2. Use a butter knife to gently scrape most of the sticker off of the surface.
3. (This is where it gets kinda weird!) If there is some sticky residue left, get some peanut butter, and spread it all over the residued places. Let it sit for a while. (I've heard that butter, or margarine, will work fine also!)
4. Wipe up most of the peanut butterwith paper towels. The floor will still be oily.
4. Put some dish soap and hot water on a dish rag, and slowly and firmly rub away the rest of the peanut butter oil. you may have to rinse out your rag a few times and do it over. But when all of the peanut butter is gone, the sticker residue will be gone, too!

Thats all the words of wisdom I have, for now!

The Newest Octo Mom!

(I am posting this on the We Made It Friday Showcase because, we didn't actually make the puppies, but I sorta helped, at least!)

The media has finally seemed to calm down about this Octo Mom...

but wait until they get a hold of this one!

Over the course of almost fifteen hours of labor, Clover gave birth to her first litter of eight puppies!
She went into labor at about nine o'clock on Sunday night. But she didn't seem to want to push her first puppy out! Finally, at about one-thirty in the morning, the first puppy was born.

A second one quickly followed...

... and then a third and a fourth!
By six in the morning, a total of six puppies had been born, and we all thought that Clover was finished. But there was still a hard lump in her stomach. Just to make sure, we took her to the vet for an X-ray, to see if maybe one more puppy was stuck. Imagine our surprise when we found out that there were two more puppies who needed to be born!
We started to get a little nervous, especially after a random lady in the waiting room told us that the unborn puppies were probably dead since Clover's contractions had stopped so long ago. But the veterinarian assured us that there was no particular reason why the puppies would die. He gave Clover a shot to induce her contractions again, and sent us home.
Shortly thereafter, Clover gave birth to a cow!
Yep, a cow. Just look!

And then she gave birth to the last puppy.
The last puppy came out with feces in it's amniotic sac. This sometimes happens when it takes too long for a puppy to get born, and its dangerous because it means the feces can get into the puppy's blood stream and cause infections. Sure enough, when the eighth puppy came out, it was barely moving. It lay there, opening its tiny mouth pitifully and gasping for air.
By this time, Clover was about done with puppies. She didn't really have any interest in licking the new puppy. (The mother dog needs to lick them, especially around the mouth, to clear the fluid from their lungs and mouthes so they can breath.) I found that she would lick the new puppy more if I cupped it in my hands and held it out to her. But she always went back to her other puppies, who were already noisy and squirmy and begging for her attention.
We tried everything! The four of us... Diana's mom, Sarah, Megan and I... worked for hours trying to revive that puppy! We even put cottage cheese on it to get Clover to lick it! Nothing seemed to work.
Finally, Diana's mom tried holding the puppy in her hands and swinging her hands downward quickly, which can sometimes clear the fluid from a puppy's lungs if nothing else is working.
It worked! The newest puppy started to bleat loudly!
And then she never stopped.
She lay there and made wailing noises, while Clover mostly ignored her. Diana's mom worried that maybe we shouldn't have tried so hard to revive the puppy. Sometimes when a dog doesn't pay attention to one puppy, its because she knows that something has gone wrong with the puppy.
The weirdest thing was when Clover suddenly picked up the tiny puppy and walked a few steps away from the other puppies. Then she sat on it! Sarah and Megan worried that Clover was actually trying to smother the puppy! But after a few minutes, she seemed to be trying to nurse it.
The good news is, the tiniest puppy is now doing pretty well! She's obviously the runt of the litter, and doesn't have much interest in eating. She also likes a lot of human attention... I guess because she spent so much time in our cupped hands while we tried to get her to live! She'll start whining and yelping, and as soon as we pick her up, she'll cuddle up and quiet down. I have a special place in my heart for this little runt, whom Sarah named Muffin!

So, you want to see some more puppy pictures? I know you do!

Aren't they the sweetest things you've ever seen?
Helping them be born was one of the most awesome things I've ever done in my life.
I'll be sure to post more puppy pictures, as they get bigger and bigger!

 

Dog Tied!

Yesterday I wrote about how our two little dogs, Mijo and Clover, got themselves into a bit of a jam. Well, this afternoon I came home from taking the girls out. Monkeyboy and his friend were home, and they told me the dogs were out in the yard. I thought it was a little weird that the dogs didn't run to the back door when I got home, because they usually become completely psychotic whenever I come home!!! They're my babies! so anyway, I went to take the garbage out back, and saw the dogs standing together on the other side of the yard. they were just standing there, staring at me! I called to them. They wagged their tails, but didn't come. I thought, "Hmm, thats very weird!" Even when I bent down and opened my arms, they didn't run to me!
Then Monkeyboy came outside to see what was going on. he walked over to them and said, "Oh no, they're stuck together again!"

The dogs appear to be joined at the butt!

Monkeyboy brought the dogs inside, and we tried to help them.
This time they were stuck together for a good hour. Me and Monkeyboy tried Jimmy's trick of pouring cold water on them, but it didn't work! At that point, Monkeyboy decided the whole thing was freaking hiim out, so he totally abandoned me and went to watch TV in his room.
So then I Googled it. I found out that what happened to the dogs was called a "tie", and that its normal when two dogs are mating. All of the info I found, which was mostly for people who were trying to purposely breed dogs, said not to splash water on them! It said to just try and keep them calm, and to try to keep them from dragging each other around.
I enlisted Little Bears help in keeping the dogs calm. She took it very seriously, as you can see from this picture! she brought their food and water over to them, and gave them each a stuffed animal! (Little Bear wants to be an animal doctor when she grows up!)

Eventually the dogs did manage to part ways.
Sooooo....
Anyone want some really weird looking puppies?

I'll Take "Things That Could Only Happen In Our House" for 500!

So this morning I was playing with Pufferfish in the living room, when I heard the two dogs, Clover and Mijo, whimpering from the kitchen. I glanced over, and noticed that they were standing very close together, facing in opposite directions, and not moving.
Because they were stuck that way!
Apparently Mijo had been humping Clover, and his you-know-what got stuck in her you-know-what! MMijo, by theway, has a very large you-know-what. (If you follow that link, it won't take you t anything pornographic, don't worry... although its a pretty graphic picture of Mijo!)
As I was standing there trying to figure out what to do, Mijo started to run across the room, dragging the hapless Clover along behind him!
I figured that had to be pretty painful for both of them, so I sat down on the kitchen floor with them, and started petting them both, in hopes of getting them both to calm down and hold still. I was hoping if Mijo relaxed, they would become unstuck! I called Pufferfish into the kitchen so I could keep an eye on her, too. Pufferfish kept pointing at the dogs and saying, "Doggies stuck! Owie!"
And the dogs both kept sending me nervous glances, like, "We have really done it this time, haven't we!" If it wasn't so nerve-wracking, I would have been ROFL!
Jimmy was in the shower all this time. By the time he got out, the dogs were still stuck, and I was nearly in tears! I started explaining the situation to Jimmy, who calmly filled up a glass of water.
Why is he getting a drink of water? Doesn't he see that the dogs are stuck together like Siamese twins? I wondered.
Then Jimmy calmly poured the glass of water on the dogs.
The dogs started freaking out and dragging each other around in circles. Jimmy opened the back door, and the dogs ran out. Pufferfish and I watched, astounded.
"Let them go out. The cold causes shrinkage," Jimmy explained.
Sure enough, within a few seconds, the dogs had separated themselves and were running amok in the backyard.
Weird...

Nature Calls!

Today Little bear and Pufferfish and i had a sort of campy theme. We read stories about camping and summer camp, went to the nature center, and tie-dyed some shirts!

But before the day had even started, nature called to us in another way!

I was helping the little girls get dressed, and the dogs were playing together, when Little Bear said, "Whats the matter with Mijo's privates?"

i looked over, and oh dear Lord, the puppy's... eh-em... private part was extended all the way down to his feet!

i mean, this little guy is hung!

Mijo didn't quite know what to do about the situation. He just stood there, staring at me, with his tail between his legs. It actually looked like he had two tails between his legs, since the private part was about the same length as the tail!

i called Diana to tell her, and after laughing for a while she told me to call Jimmy, and Jimmy didn't know what to do so I called back Diana, who was at work trying to consult the internet to find out what could be the problem with Mijo.

She asked me to send her a picture of Mijo so she could see exactly what was happening there.

Here is the picture I hastily snapped with my phone. Kind of blurry, but i think you'll get the idea!

Anyway, while we were all trying to figure out what to do for Mijo, he solved the problem himself. He just licked it for a while, and finally it shrunk back to its normal size!

Which was a huge relief to me, because Diana's Internet research had led her to some information that advised me to do some very X-rated things to Mijo to get the "swelling" to go down!

Now, go wash your eyeballs out with soap! Then scroll down to see some nice, sweet pictures of the kids!

Oh yeah, and the tie-dyes? Here's some pics of them in process! Chck back tomorrow to see how the finished products turned out! (They have to sit in plastic overnight before we rinse them out!)

Introducing A New Friend!

Our household has a new family member! I'd like to introduce Mijo (Spanish for "my son") the four-month-old chihuahua/rat terrier puppy!
Brandon has been begging for a chihuahua, literally as long as he's known how to talk! When he was about six years old we glover, a maltese/poodle, because DIana's mom bred that type of dog. Clover has always been an awesome do, but Brandon still longed for a chihuahua! Just recently, he somehow managed to get Diana to seriously consider getting him one.
So, here he is!