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.
Natters Matters 