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Please Note This cam is not always going to look its best because of lighting conditions, space limitations and just the nature of the subject. It may be too dark to see, etc. Also, my wife may have simply moved the camera out of her way! <grin> I promise I will do what I can to keep it trained on the subject while I'm on puppy duty. Also, sometimes the whole system just freezes up and I have to restart it. Please try to be patient and if you see the time and date on the picture does not match up with the current time and date, try back later. Thanks!!

12-30-06 - Empty Nest
I have to apologize for failing to update this page for the past two weeks. Our computer took a dump and was barely running during that time and I finally had to reformat and reinstall all the software over the past two days. Needless to say, the pups have all gone to their new homes. The last one (Mr Orange) flew off to New Jersey this morning with his mom, Inga. I spoke to her during their layover in Houston and he did great on the first leg. We did our best to tire him out this morning. Mr. Blue (new name Pacer) is spending a couple of days on the S. Washington coast before finishing the rest of his trip home with new mom and dad, Monica and Joe. Monica called and left a message to say he was doing great on the drive. Maureen and Mike are almost home in Calgary with Miss Pink (new name Tempo). Tempo did her best the other night to try and get them kicked out of their hotel room in Asheville OR. LOL! Evidently Tempo gave quite a concert from her crate the first night. Why does that not surprise me? <grin> Just go back and watch the archived video with her bellowing at a very young age.

I know I joked around a lot about not missing the little hooligans when they left but of course that is not true. While we're glad to have our house back, both Terry and I are terribly sad not to have them with us. I was fighting tears back as I said goodbye to Mr. Orange at the airport. They came gushing as I pulled away from the curb and watched them disappear into the terminal. I know he will have a wonderful life with Inga and her family as will the other two. Spirit was clearly depressed the past two days as well but she's coming around. This was particularly hard on Terry as she poured her heart and soul into these puppies over the past 8 weeks. <sigh>

I will do some more updates here with pictures and videos from the last couple of weeks when I get some time. Stay tuned!

12-15-06 - Here There and Everywhere
Well you may have noticed the puppies are no longer showing up on the puppycam as much these days. They are moving around a lot. They are spending time in the kitchen more and more and out on the back lawn too. They are getting so spoiled having the run of the kitchen that they really pitch a fit when you put them back into the sleep area in the living room. This is both my favorite time with the pups and my least favorite time. They are just so demanding but so darn cute and fun to be around. They finally have discovered shoelaces. Ugh! You have to walk around the kitchen by shuffling your feet to keep from stepping on them as they chase your feet.

I'll try and do a better job of moving the camera around. I did have it out in the yard on Thursday afternoon around 4:30 so I hope some of you saw them out playing in the yard.

12-09-06 - Bigger Is Better
This evening I pulled the first potty box out of there and built a new, bigger one. It was just too much to expect them to make the effort to find the target so this one is 4x4 which basically covers additional area that we were covering in newspaper. They have been very good about peeing in that general area so this should do the trick. I used 2x2s to frame it as mentioned in an earlier post. They are MUCH more active now and interacting much more with the toys etc. Too cute! I'll have to get in there and make another video either tonight or tomorrow. Holy smokes, they'll be going home in a few weeks! Cripes!

It was so funny this afternoon because we had family over to see the pups today and they stayed awake playing longer than they normally would if left to their own. Towards the end, the two boys had crawled off to nap and Pink Girl was still trying her darndest to stay awake but she was laying there with her eyes at half mast and you could almost hear the hypnotist saying, "you're getting sleepy...sleeeeeepy". What a hoot.

Another landmark that happened I think yesterday but several times today was that Blue Boy was the winner of the "first to climb over the fence" contest. Later today I had gone out into the garage and Terry was IN the pen with the pups when she noticed Blue Boy was not there. She was on her way to go ask me if I had taken him out with me when she noticed him tooling around the living room just very pleased with himself. So we now have a higher board. Just try and get over THAT Mr Smarty Pants Blue Boy! <grin> Of course now Spirit scrapes her boobs on the board when she goes in and out. OUCH! That can not feel good. Neither can those sharp teeth and she is clearly not spending as much time nursing them lately. They started on their puppy food a few days ago and that is going well and not too soon for Spirit I'm sure.

12-06-06 - One Month Old
The beasties were 4 weeks old yesterday. I got the potty box made on Monday night but then I think I made it too small and should have stood the two-by-fours on edge instead of flat. There is too much surface of wood exposed and they are too tempted to hang their rears over onto the wood and uh.. well... let it rip. <grin> I think I'll make a new one from two-by-twos instead.

This evening I got into the pen with them and had a blast filming them from up close. Lots of blurry stuff that had to be edited out but what was left was very cute. Sheesh I can't believe Pink Girl was humping Mr. Orange. Cracks me up how early they start that behavior. The other day I saw Pink lift her leg when she was peeing. She's gonna be a pissstol, that one.

12-03-06 - New Digs
Terry got home from watching the NOI in Long Beach this evening and we got started swapping out the whelping box for the small xpens and a larger area for the pups. They are now all settled into their new digs. I started training them to pottying on paper on Friday night and they are doing pretty good with it. Tomorrow I'm going to build a little potty box for them and fill it with Carefresh, which is a bedding material made from cellulose and used primarily for rodents like hamsters. It works great for a potty box because it's ultra absorbent and can be packed down hard so it doesn't get tracked all over the place like shavings do.

11-26-06 - Hanging out.
Today was another day of hanging around the house because Terry and Dixie went for their second day of the Turkey Circuit Obed. Trial. Today's trial was Stockton. They were only showing Fri and Sunday of the four day series of shows. By the way, they won Utility and Open again today. Woof! Got a 196.5 in Utility and 199.5 in Open along with High in Trial and High Combined again. Good job girls! The club was giving cash prizes but Terry won't tell me how much it was. LOL! Anyone out there want to spill the beans? I should at least get SOME of that for puppy sitting! <grin> So I spent the day trying to catch up on my imaging for the photography business.

The pups continue to do great. They aren't making nearly the fuss I had predicted two days ago when the were suddenly screaming like banshees and starting to teeth. That lasted about 2 hours and then they settled down to an occasional whining. No complaints here! I had a problem with the recordings from the webcam and didn't have any archived footage to make a[ "video of the day" from so I climbed in there with the camcorder and took some footage to include for today. Man they are so cute!

Spirit is still not gaining much wait back. Her poops are finally looking more normal and she's handling the almost triple portions of food fine now with no more loose stools. Wow it's always so scary to see them drop wait like they do when they are nursing. It's hard to cram enough food in them. It's of course much harder when they have a larger litter sucking the life out of them. Makes me wonder how mothers in the wild manage to survive nursing a large litter. I guess they get really skinny too.

11-24-06 - Black Friday
Ugh! I do believe it is beginning - teething. That's right, tee eee eee tee aitch eye in gee - teething. Isn't it appropriate that it begins on Black Friday? By this time tomorrow I'll be stammering around humming the Elmer Fud tune, "Kill The Wabbit".

Actually it's not all that bad. They only go into fits from time to time with long periods of sleep in between. It's much worse when you have a larger litter so this will be a piece of cake. Really! <grin>

Terry has been at a dog show all day with Dixie so it's just me, Cricket, Spirit and the wee ones.
Update - Terry got back this evening from the show. She and Dixie took all the marbles. First in Open with a 198-5, First in Utility with a 196, High In Trial, High Combined, won run-offs in both classes and finished their third UDX. Quite a day!

Well if any of you noticed the Google ads yesterday and wondered where they went, I kicked them out. I was afraid that the first ads that would pop up would be from some puppy mill like GetAPuppyInADay.com and I was right. They came in a rush and I could hardly keep up with changing the filter settings to banish them. Even then, Google says it takes 4 hours for the filter to take effect. By morning more than 12 hours after I had added them to the filter list, some were still showing up so I kissed Goggle AdSense goodbye and wrote them a letter of cancellation. I told them it could be compared to having a company that sold children's toys where one of their items was a "rubber ducky" and then having an ad pop up from Trojan Condoms. Not exactly what I had in mind but then I suppose I should have known.

11-23-06 - Thanksgiving
Happy Thanksgiving everyone. The pups continue to grow. And grow. And grow. LOL! Funny how they do that! Their eyes are almost completely open now and all three are starting to move more steadily on their feet - sometimes getting up and walking right across the width of the whelping box. Last night Terry felt the first of the teeth starting to swell under the gums on one of the boys. They'll probably be a little fussy again. I was playing around with the webcam software and saw that I could record to the hard drive. This is a surveilance camera afterall so I guess that figures. Duh! <grin> So I've set it to record and I'm going to go back and pick a clip from each day and put it here as an imbedded flash movie so everyone can watch a little bit of what they are doing each day. I may even go into my studio software and edit a few clips together as I have time. The first install is up so I hope you enjoy. Blue boy got left out of this one so for you Blue Boy fans, I'm sorry. I'll feature him in the next one. How's that? Hope everyone has a great Thanksgiving and thanks for tuning in.

Oh! One other thing, I've been talking with Google and I've decided to start putting Google Adsense content on this page. I had to make some modifications to comply with their rules. I had the whole page refreshing instead of just the cam image. They don't allow that because because they pay for unique visits to the page and a refresh would cause it to count again. So... I've fixed that and will be working on putting in their code. The ads will show up in a panel along the right side. For anyone looking for the code to refresh an image without refreshing the whole page, I found the code here. I hope the content of the ads are helpful and appropriate. I'm not at all confident that they will be so I'll be monitoring them. Still, they should not be intrusive or get in your way of viewing the content and if you find them useful or interesting, by all means lick on them and check them out. If you have any coments about them, let me me know.

11-018-06 Saturday
Today the pups got their first big road trip. They went for their chiropractic visit. Lots of picturs and info are here.

11-017-06 Friday
It's day 10 and they are still growing fast. I took pictures here and there this whole week and just loaded them to a new page here. The puppies' eyes are starting to open now so photo ops will be fewer and farther between. Will be using the tripod and shooting without lights for a while until everyone's eyes are completely open and they are adjusted to seeing the new world in all it's bright glory. Oh yeah, first they get the eyes and then they get the teeth and then watch out feet!

11-09-06 Thursday
I just got through loading the pictures from this week up to the web. They are here if you want to take a look.

11-07-06 Tuesday 6:00 PM
Yippie! I got the new webcam up and running. Big difference! The new webcam is wireless so when the puppies are old enough to go out side, I can easily tote the camera out there without dragging cables around. It also has full pan, tilt and 12x optical zoom so it should do everything I need it to do to keep these pups in the picture. Plus I can give individuals access to live streaming video with remote control capability as I see fit. I'm still tweaking it but it looks so much better already.

11-07-06 Tuesday 3:15 PM
Whew! Still awake and running on only 1 hours sleep sometime last night. Everyone is doing great though. Spirit is being the consummate mom and the pups are belly up to the milk bar with all those nipples and only three of them to compete for them. What a life! They'll probably all have colic by morning. <grin> Actually not funny because there is nothing funny about a puppy screaming non-stop because their tummy hurts. Spirit got the shot of oxytocin but it didn't help to push the stray placenta out. Guess we're just going to have to leave it in there and hope it doesn't cause any problems like infection. The weights on the pups were as follows at birth:

Blue Boy - 15oz
Orange Boy - 12oz
Pink Girl - 15.5oz

We were initially worried about orange boy because he wasn't nursing well but he kicked right in after an hour or so and is doing great and pushing his way to the milk.

11-07-06 Tuesday 6:00 AM
It's a girl!! Whew! Lots of hooting and hollering on that one. The sack had broken before she got out and she was pretty blue and filled with fluid when Terry first got her out but she was able to use the bulb and pull the fluid out of her airway. Whew again!
Back to taking pictures.

11-07-06 Tuesday 5:27 AM
Yikes and another boy! He came exactly 1 hour after the first one. Spirit is already having contractions again so the third one may be coming right behind.

11-07-06 Tuesday 4:27 AM
It's a boy! First puppy born at 4:27. Came out supine (on his back) so it was a bit painful for poor Spirit. Hopefully things will go better with the last two.

11-07-06 Tuesday 3:30 AM
Strong contractions now and she started vibrating like a cell phone battery. Terry reached up and can feel the sack of the first puppy in the canal. Any moment now!

11-07-06 Tuesday 2:40 AM
JoJo arrived a few minutes ago. Ken is staying in bed until we call him when the water breaks. For the past few hours Spirit has been into the heavy panting mode and very restless.

11-07-06 Tuesday 1:00 AM
Finally - heavy panting now and she's starting to have small contractions. Called Joanne and Ken and they are getting ready to drive up to help.

11-07-06 Tuesday 12:30 AM
No news is good news, right? Wrong. Still nothing major going on but we're getting close I think. She's not panting heavy yet but has been "low panting" most of the day and her temperature remains low. The pups have clearly dropped and are very low in the pelvic area now and Spirit is clearly uncomfortable but hasn't reached that panicky stage they usually get to right before going into labor. She did start digging a little while ago and that's the first sign of that I've seen. I caught a few winks and Terry needed the same so I'm back up and on watch.

11-06-06 Monday 8:30 AM
Spirit's temp dropped further - down to 97.7 this morning so things are moving along. I was concerned she'd do what Dixie did and spend a day down only to go back up for two days. Looks like she's staying down - for now. Our friends JoAnne and Ken are going to come over and help with the whelping when things start moving along.

I've been given a very stern warning (uh oh!) by Terry to turn the web cam off and don't turn it back on until after the puppies are born. Send all complaints to her. <grin> . My vote is to have it on throughout.

By the way, more recent pictures have been posted of Spirit and of Shale this past weekend.

11-05-06 Sunday PM
After a long wait we have finally almost arrived at the moment. Spirit's temperature dropped this morning fairly substantially falling well below 99 degrees. Later in the day it rose up to just barely 99 so we are on puppy watch officially. We thought we had until Tuesday and had planned on putting the whelping box up tonight but decided to put it up this morning instead for good measure. Everything is in place. This may be just a false alarm but...

I spent the whole afternoon and most of this evening getting this stinkin' webcam up for our friends. Hope you appreciate it guys! <grin> It's been three years since I've messed with it and I forgot how to configure everything but it's working now. I'll be swapping in a new camera in the next couple of days so the image will be a lot better after that.

So sit back and relax and enjoy waiting with us!

11-04-06 Friday
Terry took Spirit down to Dr. Keesling for an x-ray to confirm that she still was still carrying three puppies. An ultrasound done at 4 weeks indicated that's how many she had and now we have a firm count and know what to expect. They were all nicely developed and BIG! We were worried about that when we learned she was only carrying three. <worried look>