An Eventful Week

Week six, and the Fab Four are sturdier on their feet, and sing in ever louder voices. They stand at the edge of the pen and cry piteously to be let out.

Breeze is weaning them now, to their great dislike, even though they are chowing down on their solid food, which no longer has to be ground up. Those teeth are coming in handy! They also are a stage where they bite, so Mom and Nana have to correct them, hard, when they decide to sink their little white teeth into someone’s ankle.

Using two large heaters, we have managed to keep the garage where they are living, very warm even in the coldest nights we have been having recently, with temps down into the upper thirties. We rearranged the whelping pen/exercise area so that they have a large potty area with pellets, which they are using nicely, having box trained themselves with about 85% success.

They play now more than ever before, leaping and bunnyhopping from one end of the pen to the other, and have favorite toys: the tug rat that their friend Kathryn brought them, a cardboard tube that Poppy cut into sections so that they can peek down through it and run around with it, and several small Nylabones on which to sharpen their needle teeth. Big Brother Cody has been in the pen with them to play, but doesn’t always understand his own strength and has to be stopped from squashing them down onto the floor with an enthusiastic playbow.

Linda gets to do all the work now, scooping up puddles and poops from the litter box, daily broom sweeping the big pen and then washing it down and rinsing it and drying it, so that they don’t slip and slide once they’re back inside. They howl in a crate the whole time she is working so hard—what do they care if they have a clean pen? She has also started stacking them on the kitchen counter in show stances so that they will know what to do when it’s time to take photos at seven weeks, and is also working on getting them tuned up weightwise so that they don’t look like little tubes whose conformation is impossible to assess.

There are few photos of Ringo this week as he just didn’t want to cooperate with the camera, but we’ll be trying again!