Just in - New Spacing for your garden ; )

They DO look like cinnamon rolls!

Kelejan wrote:

Goosegirl wrote:Can you squeeze them in at 4 inches apart if they don't need room for fur?  Would that classify hairless cats as determinate and coated cats indeterminate?  Will fur length need to be considered for extra spacing?  Savannahs, a large hybrid variety, may need to be one per square and on the north end of the box so that their large size does not shade smaller varieties such as your Munchkins. The endless varieties of cats, we will need a complete planting chart just for this one crop!

You didn't even mention mother cats with kittens.

Mother cats with kittens? I'd just treat them like my strawberry bed. Plant the daughter kits in a new bed and leave the mommas more room in the old bed.

Our Australian shepherd Feather is getting nervous and panting and groaning a lot, and she stopped eating -- she's going to have puppies today! If a female is especially cute, we may wind up saving seeds!

Good luck, Feather! Been there, 3 times!

"Saving seeds"  

When she is all done, (I would not want you to bug her with delivery room photo shoots). post Photos, photos!  Congrats

So how'd it go?  Is Feather okay?  How many did you end up with????

We are all gathered in the waiting room.

Yes, pacing back and forth in anticipation.

Puppeeeeeeeeeeeeezzzz!

We were expecting four. We got 11! Holy cow, almost three times what the ultrasound revealed. It's not the first time we've seen at best a casual relationship between how many puppies you get and how many the ultrasound sees. You get the ultrasound so if there is a puppy leftover after the mother seems done, you can go to the vet and get it taken out before it becomes septic and kills the mother. I guess mostly one just hopes it might be helpful, but there's not much chance it is.

We got four girls and five boys. That's not 11, but one was delivered looking like it might be in the process of being partially resorbed, so it was never alive or viable. That was the second to the last one. The last one was a beautiful blue merle, but it never moved or breathed. We tried our best to clear out its lungs by cradling its head and neck and shoulders and then swinging it back and forth between our legs like a pendulum; that sometimes works. And we pulled and dabbed at its nose to get what mucus out we could, etc. No go.

The last three before those last two all came out with white mouths and gasping for breath unnaturally. We did the swinging thing, and on one I was able to pull a huge strand of mucus from its nose, which helped it finally get air properly. Number seven was very hard to keep alive, and so was number nine, which was hardest of all. But the last three troubled cases all survived, and we're so happy about that! Seven and nine are actually some of the most beautiful pups we got.

If I recall correctly, we got two black and white boys and two black and white girls, two red boys, a blue merle girl, a red merle girl, and a red merle boy. Yeah, that's nine. Number nine looks a lot like his brown and white grandfather, the world's friendliest dog and doggy daddy and babysitter, so I like him already. I'll put up pictures when I can. They can change so much in just a couple of weeks that soon you might not be able to recognize them from their baby pictures.

Well, I was up all night with them, so I'm going to take a nap soon. Thanks for the curiosity and well-wishing! Soon I'll show you folks our beautiful new, healthy dogs -- all *gulp* nine of them!

Well done! Sweet dreams Marc.

*whispering* crud, the least he could have done was put up a photo of how they were spaced before going for a nap.

Thanks for the update Marc.  Wow what an event!  The many "aunts and uncles" on the forum are very happy.

CONGRATS!!!

And a big to poor Feather; eleven pups to birth!!!  She must be pooped.  Is this her first litter?

Thanks all!

Molly, yep, her first litter. And what a way to start out! A couple of times today I've seen her looking soooooo tired.

Nine puppies is a lot to feed, so we're feeding her every few hours and letting her eat as much as she wants. The puppies came out skinny, and within half an hour of us holding them to Feather's nipples so they could figure out what food was, they started looking like cute little furry balloons.

Marc, Don't dogs have 8 baby bottles? If so, will you be helping out on some of the feedings? Dang, Feather must feel overwhelmed and tired.

We got some puppy milk formula and a syringe in case we need to help out. Feather can be a pretty hyper dog, and last night she was jumping about and constantly in danger of crushing her puppies. She licked them so obsessively, hour after hour, that they couldn't get to or stay at a nipple, and they need to feed within the first four hours to get the mother's colostrum milk, which helps provide their underdeveloped immune systems with some protection. We also worried she might give them a hernia or rip open their umbilical cord by constantly fussing with it.

But today she's calmed down a lot and is being more careful too. She's letting the puppies nurse and unlike some doggy mommies we've had, she likes staying with them. I think she's going to be a good mother ... though she does have a tendency to step or lean on them sometimes and that makes me very nervous. Hopefully it's all part of the learning process and she'll get better at it and more aware over time.

As long as the puppies look like they're feeding and developing properly, we probably won't use the puppy milk formula. But if some stay skinny or look lifeless while the others are all getting fat and happy, it will be time to step in. They grow so fast at this stage that it will probably be easy to tell.

Sweet!

Hugs to you and especially Feather, bless her heart! Take care of the little miracles! And their momma!

Is their granddaddy in your avatar? Is Feather?

GoodNESS!  Well, I'm glad that 9 of them are fine.  I'm sorry about the other 2...

Give Feather a big, long hug!

Scorpio Rising wrote:Is their granddaddy in your avatar? Is Feather?

Grampa Buddy is top left. Feather is top middle.

Buddy has so much people power. I took him down to the local grange today and every person who walked past us through the parallel aisles running past the area where I was studying seed packets came over and made a big fuss about him. One lady said she saw him from halfway across the store and he immediately seemed curious about her. She made a hand motion for him to sit and he did right away. She was very impressed with his manners -- and brains. A gaggle of teenagers begged me to pet him and started in immediately telling him how much they loved him. Two or three hard-looking characters showed their softer side before they could help it when they passed by, reaching out to pet him and smiling like kids, their shells cracked. The fella has magic, I'm telling ya. He likes everybody and everybody likes him. On the way out, all the cashiers fed him treats and came over to coo over him and rub his ears.

Here's a thread where we were talking lots about dogs and I introduced some of our dogs and what they were doing:

https://squarefoot.forumotion.com/t18429-pnw-august-2014

An - ti - ca - payaytion is making me wait....
Keepin' me way-yay-yay-yay-yay-yaiting...

Knew it! Buddy was the brown & white, he is awesome, and Feather is a beaut! She doin' good with motherhood?

CapeCoddess wrote:An - ti - ca - payaytion is making me wait....
Keepin' me way-yay-yay-yay-yay-yaiting...

You and me both!

Okay, first the introductions.  Here's Feather:



Here's Junior, the daddy:





And here are the two star-crossed lovers:



And the fruit of their union, one exhausted mommy and nine puppies:

Oh, beautiful. Well worth the wait.