first dog – Natters Matters

Puppies aren’t Quiet

I feel like my entire dog experience can be summarized in, “I googled way too much,” and at the same time, “I maybe should have been a little more prepared than I was.” Based on my calculations and best guesses, Ginger was going to give birth sometime around April 8th.

Two weeks before that date, I stopped bringing her to work with me so that she could get more rest at home. Let me tell you that the last thing you want to do with a husky who has separation anxiety and a very poor functioning digestive system is to completely uproot their routine. I had more messes to deal with, and anything made of wood within her reach was chewed to splinters. She also began peeing on the carpet again which is not something that she had done since we got her. In dog language, she was ticked off and freaked out.

My prediction for my dog’s due date was off by nine days. On March 30th, I woke up and watched her pace around the apartment panting as if she had been running. She started gathering her toys and placing them at the foot of our bed. Around noon she had decided that the tight space underneath our bed was a safe place to birth. She parked down there and did not want to come out for any reason whatsoever.

Puppies did not come about until late that night about 8:30pm. I was expecting yellow puppies from either a golden retriever dad or a yellow labradoodle dad so when I found that she had quietly given birth to two black and white puppies, I was scratching my head. They looked exactly like husky puppies.

We did get to watch the third and final puppy be born. Let me tell you that the experience of watching an animal birth is both incredible and disgusting at the same time. When a woman give birth, it is usually a process that is accompanied by multiple helpers. When a dog gives birth, she did not research Google or talk to her fellow momma dog friends about what their birth experience was. God just wired it in their brains to find a place to nest, push the puppies out, pop the amniotic sack, and eat all the afterbirth mess. Not only that, but for the first three weeks of a puppy’s life, they are unable to pee or poop with out stimulation. Momma dog has to do that by licking them and eating everything that comes out of them.

If you have ever had to bottle feed puppies or kittens abandoned by their mothers or where the mother dog died, you know how much gross work it is to keep the adorable little pups alive, and you really appreciate all the work that the momma animal does.

No one taught my dog how to do that. I certainly did not stand their with a slide show presentation telling her: “So Ginger if you don’t stimulate your babies, they will bloat up and die.” God simply just planted that in her brain, and honestly, when I cleaned out underneath the bed much later afterwards, I was very surprised with how clean it was.

Another naive thing I believed was that the first two weeks of puppies lives, they are little lumps who do nothing but eat and sleep. They never make any noises or high pitched squeals when they wandered five inches away from mom and can’t find their way back because they are 100% blind and deaf. I should have known better having been around tiny baby kittens most of my childhood. They are quite loud for their size.

The difference between child Natalie and adult Natalie was that adult Natalie lived in an apartment, an apartment with other adults who had headaches and wanted to live in peace. She did not want her landlord to get constant complaints about baby dog noises from her apartment. Child Natalie had no such worries because she lived on a farm house and the neighbors also had lots of barn cats.

Having tiny baby animals in Natalie’s life again, however, did make her feel like a child again. It would be a lie to say that I did not spend much of my spare time just holding them and watching them. I knew they wouldn’t be able to stay with us until they hit the eight week mark.

Thankfully, I have really gracious parents who still live on a farm house that were willing to take them in when the time came which it did much sooner than I expected.

The Vet (Part 2)

So remember how I said that I thought my dog being in heat would not in anyway hurt her spay appointment. Ha! How naive of me, I was so wrong!

After being my dog’s biggest creepy stalker and watching for pregnancy symptoms like a hawk for about three weeks, I just was not 100% sure if Ginger was or wasn’t pregnant. I called the vet, hoping I could just reschedule it only two more weeks out just to give me some more time to observe. I really did not want the puppies to die in a spay if she even was pregnant. They told me that they could not spay her until six weeks after her heat. She was about a week off.

The poor secretary told me that I would have to reschedule it another month out. The bright side to this was that I would be able to know for sure if she was pregnant by that point.

Most people wish that their dog could talk so they could tell them just how much they love them. I honestly just wanted my dog to be able to talk so she could tell me if she was pregnant.

Me: “Hey Ginger did you have a fling with that one dog?”

Ginger: “Yes I did, and you can expect puppies in your apartment in six weeks lol.”

In reality though, asking my dog such questions would only result in her staring at me with a confused look on her face wondering if I wanted to take her outside or if we were going to work again.

I will warn you that if you don’t handle bodily functions well, the next few paragraphs might not be a fun read. If you are someone who has owned animals that have birthed little minions or are just really not bothered by these kinds of things, read on.

The main things I was watching for her was 1) to get fat 2) produce milk and 3) discharge. Yes, none of that is especially fun to think about or look for on a dog, but according to my new best friend Google, they were dog pregnancy symptoms.

She did not get fat.

Ginger has been super skinny since I had taken her in, and I really did want to get her to fatten up a bit. Unfortunately my efforts were thwarted by constant diarrhea and her pickiness. When I say picky, I mean, I could not get this dog to eat anymore than a little bit of whatever I gave her. I tried white rice, eggs, chicken broth, different dry food, pumpkin, peanut butter, and lets just face it, there was no way that we could afford to feed her the raw diet. Thus, I stared at my dog wondering why she had chosen the path of the anorexic even while possibly growing babies in her belly.

Produce milk? Well that’s complicated because they do not technically produce milk until the last week of pregnancy. Granted, her nipples had not shrunk back to their proper size since she had been in heat, but sometimes that took months to go down after being in heat one time.

Discharge? Like clear discharge from a dog’s vagina? Yup… I would come home and find her laying on her back with a big, stringy blob between her legs. After this started happening, I just called it as she was pregnant.

So what did I do? I called the vet… again to cancel her appointment and try and reschedule again. Only this time they did not let me reschedule and told me to wait until the puppies were born.

Puppies… my dog was going to birth puppies in my 80% carpeted apartment.

The Vet (Part 1)

I grew up with girl dogs. I love girl dogs and boy cats. Granted, there is nothing inherently wrong with boy dogs. I struggle with them wanting to pee on walls and every other tree, but other than that, I am just biased towards wanting a girl dog because I grew up with them. My husband had the same experience growing up so we ended up with a female husky.

The thing that sucks about owning a female pet of any kind though is that getting them spayed is not cheap. Nothing at the vet is cheap, and this is why my frugal self does not like going to the vet. I do take my dog to the vet because I need her to have her rabies shots for my safety and to have her in my apartment. She needs her distemper and Bordetella in order to come to work with me.

Regardless, setting up her spay appointment was not something that I was super enthusiastic about doing, but I did schedule it right away when I got her. I hit a minor speed bump though when I called in late November, and they said that I could not bring her in until February… late February, two months later.

In case you don’t know, a female dog can go into heat anytime after she turns six months old… at which was the exact age I acquired her. This was one of those things that I really, really should have asked her previous owner if she had already been in heat because I basically had to just stare at my dog awkwardly watch for signs of going into heat.

You might say, “what’s the big deal? You live in an apartment. It’s not like she’s wandering around through the neighborhood getting to know all of the other dogs.”

I would say back, “You don’t understand. I work at a facility which has plenty of dogs who are not fixed and the one place that I can let her run around unsupervised has an intact male labradoodle currently.”

Also, if you read the Potty Training stories, you know that whenever she is left alone at home too long, my apartment and sanity suffer for it.

My husband had the smart idea of calling another vet.

Here’s the thing, I am not arguing with his logic, what I am saying is that I am frozen into going to the same vet until they do me wrong. Vets are one of those things where I feel obligated to go to the same one. I also did not want to go to another vet only to find out that they thought I was the worst pet owner in existence because I did not give my dog fifteen different supplements, depression medication, and a raw diet as a cherry on top.

Even though it literally makes absolutely no sense for me to drive forty five minutes for me to go to the same veterinary clinic when I live within fifteen minutes of five different veterinarian hospitals. Anxiety over new things can almost never be talked out of its irrational behavior, and to be honest, I just didn’t want to go to a different vet.

Also, so what if she went into heat before her spay, I knew that I would just have to keep her away from the very horny male dogs. Easy peasy. Besides, it’s not like they can’t fix her while she’s in heat, right? Right?

Her heat lasted about two and half weeks which was a hassle in of itself. Thankfully her bleeding was not as heavy as we had expected. We did buy her doggy diapers, but they were not entirely necessary and more work than worth it to get on her and keep on her. I mean, Ginger is the kind of dog that I would spend ten to twenty minutes struggling to get winter boots and a harness on her.

So when the bleeding stops, we should be in the clear?

Nope.

Don’t be so optimistic.

I found out through some more obsessive Googling that it would be another ten days of a fertile window. So more time, of trying to keep an eye on her to make sure that no horny males found her. Neither I or Ginger particularly enjoyed this time because it meant less time to play and more time in the kennel.

Her bleeding stopped about a month before her vet appointment. A new set of questions entered my Google search… “signs of pregnancy in dogs.”

Now I need to say this.

I did not see anything happen… but again due to the nature of my job and the natural order of things with animals. I always suspected something may have very likely, quite possibly occurred between her and another dog.

The unhelpful thing about Google is that it will give you some very irrelevant and useless information about rare, but wait no, not rare, actually it is very wrong, nope, now this is a common occurrence.

One of those unhelpful things is the notion of phantom pregnancy which is rare, but also quite common in dogs, or so Google tells me. Phantom pregnancy is when a dog shows all symptoms of pregnancy and adopts her toys as pups even though the animal is not in fact pregnant.

So what did I do?

I watched closely and waited…

Potty Training Pt 1: The Crate

The next two weeks were a lot of work when it came to potty training.

For some reason, she would not go potty outside. I could not figure it out. She would stare at me when I waited for her to go. I would walk her outside for long periods of time, and nothing would happen. But as soon as I stopped paying attention to her inside, she would sneak into our spare bedroom or our bedroom closet.

I must have scared her really bad by mistake when she had that first accident. Whatever the case, we were desperate to get her to do ANYTHING outside.

I took her outside constantly, and nope, no matter how many times I brought her outside. As soon as we got indoors, it was her time to shine.

I cry about a lot of things. I’m a very emotional person… but I’ve never cried so much over poop and pee in my life.

We tried the “pee here” spray from the store which I had had high hopes for… but of course, she didn’t give a rip about it.

We wouldn’t have minded the potty incidents in the apartment quite so much if she had gone on the linoleum in the kitchen/dining room… but of course, she was too good for such things and had to have the luxury of soft carpet underneath her paws as she took a dump for the fourth time today. (Legitimately, she would sometimes take four craps a day.)

Thankfully, my husband is a genius and bought carpet protection from Menard’s which we put on all of the special places she had chosen for her pooping and peeing except for our closet… there we just tried to keep the door shut. It was still a pain to clean up, but at least in this case, she wasn’t destroying the carpet more than it already was at this point.

We quickly ran into another problem common to huskies: separation anxiety.

Growing up, we always had lab mixes and destructive anxiety wasn’t ever an issue. Occasionally a loaf of bread would get snatched off of the counter, but that could be easily attributed to labs just wanting to eat everything in sight. Regardless, Ginger was a whole new ball game.

The second time I left her home alone before we had to start crating her I came home to Josh’s guitars were all knocked over. She had destroyed my little fake plant and pooped in the center of the spare bedroom. Garbage had been spread through my dining and living room. Including the fruit loops that I had to throw away earlier that morning because I had mistakenly left them alone for more than a minute on the counter. Of course, now that she had been left home alone for two hours, she did not have any interest in eating them until she had ten minutes to calm down and realize I was home to stay.

Crating was another nightmare in of itself.

The first time I was super nervous, but when I came home nothing was destroyed or pooped on. So I thought, oh, she’s already crate trained.

I was very wrong in such fantastical assumptions.

I made this unfortunate discovery one day when I was home sick, and I don’t know why I did it, but I put her in the crate. I just wanted to while I napped. She did not stop crying and she loathed the crate entirely. The worst was when she would rock the crate back and forth knocking it against the wall. I panicked. What was I supposed to do? I couldn’t stay home with her. I would go insane if I had to stay home with my dog and never able to go anywhere without bringing her.

I did a lot of panic googling at this time, and one of the things that the inter webs told me was that it can take up to six months to crate train a dog.

Six months…

It wouldn’t have mattered had our living situation been different. When you live in an apartment complex and you really, really don’t want to get a noise violation… it’s a whole other deal.

Despite my worries… noise was not the one I should have had high on my priority list.

Crate training and potty training are not a great combination… especially when the potty accident happens in the crate… and then the dog proceeds to dance in it.

The first accident was bad. Poop smeared everywhere and dried onto the bars. I immediately took her outside and then we hit the bathtub.

Second time was easier to clean, and she hadn’t quite trampled it everywhere. A

Accidents weren’t bad compared to what was coming…

She was strong enough to bend the bars and escaped one evening. As predicted, she did tear up the room and found a big bag of stuffing which got destroyed. The worst though was the carpet… she tried to dig herself out of the room and tore the carpet to shreds in the process.

Thankfully we were able to figure out the problem and did a temporary fix.

But that’s all it was, a temporary fix.

Another night, she did not escape, but I took one look at this kennel and realized that it was not worth salvaging.

See everyone tells you. Don’t get a husky. They are so much work, and even though you know that they are right, you get one anyways because you want a pretty and fun dog. I was like, “I can handle the energy.”

Energy was not the problem with this doggo. Just the minor things like poop on the carpet and destructive separation anxiety. Everyone wants to live in a home that smells of dog crap and destroyed flooring.

I was exhausted and very stressed out trying to keep this dog under control and not give up on her. I did not want to give her up. I don’t say that with the most noble of incentives. Money was a big incentive, meaning we’d already dumped a bunch of money into her. Also, despite all of the issues we were having, I still loved having a dog around and really did not want to go back to not having one.