These babies are six weeks old, curly-haired, wiggly, cuddly, teething like crazy, and just adorable.
Red wagon photo shoot below: I tried to get them all together as well as individual shots. Names are on captions so you can find yours.
I also made a short video of their first vet trip —the link is at the bottom of this post.
When the puppies were around a month old, I dragged out Shiloh’s crate that she hasn’t needed to use in a year or so. We followed Dr Ian Dunbar’s recommendation of “restriction now, freedom later” with her and kept her crated except for potty and play breaks for the first year and a half. It seems extreme but it worked so well that we haven’t needed to crate her as an adult at all, which I love.
Anyway, the puppies needed more space than their pen provided and we wanted them to get accustomed to the crate being a pleasant and safe space to sleep in case their future owners choose to crate train them. Now they have a slightly larger play/eat area besides the sleep and potty sections that we had available to them at three to four weeks.
After an intense week or two of constantly washing their bedding, they caught on to the idea that bed is clean and potty pads are messy, and now they go on their potty pads almost exclusively when they are in their pen! They prefer not to mess in their pen and most will sit at the gate and whine if they need to go outside to do their business. I’m so pleased with their progress and it’s a relief that they keep their bedding clean now!
After supplementing with goats milk for almost two weeks, we’ve fully transitioned them to four meals a day of canned puppy food and moistened kibble, with some dry kibble left out for them to nibble on.
Shiloh is wearing a weaning shirt to help discourage them from nursing.
They also are taking a probiotic the vet recommended to help with their digestion.
On Friday, they had their first vet checkup, shots, fecal exam to check for worms (negative), and flea preventative.
The vet was impressed with how calm and gentle they were - not one puppy cried when they got their shots!
They got weighed at the vet as well. Aurora is our lightest puppy now at 6 lb 15 oz and Sadie Mae is still the chunkiest at 8 lb 5 oz.
Heres the video of our trip to the vet: