Wednesday May 29 -- Midnight

Cocoa woke me up to let her outside. When we came downstairs there was a little puppy lying in the middle of our kitchen floor. I quickly woke up my partner and we moved the puppy into the whelping bed we had prepared and encouraged Cocoa to get in there too ... the adventure begins.

The happy parents are Cocoa, who is 100% soft coated wheaten terrier from Northern Saskatchewan, born February 21, 2011; she came to us by Air Canada air freight about 10 weeks later.

and Chai, a soft coated wheaten terrier (dad) and Airedale terrier (mom) cross, born July 23, 2012, and who I picked up from just outside Edson, Alberta, 7 weeks later -- as you can see he takes after his dad and has no Airedale characteristics except a slightly different face shape; he is also slightly larger than a typical soft coated wheaten. He's only 10 months old so either his colouring has still not lightened quite as much as it will or he may have inherited a touch of red colour from his Airedale mom.

10 days before the puppies came we had an X-ray done to determine how many puppies she was carrying. The X-ray showed 5 clearly and what looked like the tail end of a 6th puppy with it's head tucked up under Cocoa's ribs. We were told to expect 5 or 6 puppies on June 2.Cocoa and Chai had tied on Easter Sunday in the kitchen; I had spent 1/2 hour walking around them while trying to cook a little Easter dinner -- another wheaten adventure). The gestation period for dogs is about 63 days.

With her in her whelping bed with her 1 puppy she was very nervous and anxious at first. She wouldn't allow it to feed, which seemed a little weird because she had obviously cleaned it and cleaned up after this birth that had happened so quickly and quietly it didn't even wake me up. She went outside twice and we went with her just to keep an eye on her. She kept going underneath our deck. We began to wonder if she had already had a puppy before we went to bed, we grabbed flashlight and looked carefully but there was nothing there.We guess it was just because it was a dry place and we'd had a lot of rain. We got her to finally settle down a bit and I turned on a light at the other end of the kitchen and pulled up a chair; reading a book between the births and watching closing during each birth to be sure things seemed to progress okay. She did great with the second one and all of a sudden it was like she was an expert; she cleaned it, ate up the mess (which seems kind of gross but I guess that's the way nature intended these things), and allowed both pups to do a little nursing. After each pup I petted her a bit, encouraged her, brought a bowl of water right to her in case she wanted a drink and then I sat back in my chair and watched as she settled into the routine of giving birth to two puppies a few minutes apart with a much larger break between pairs. The birth schedule is shown below in case you are interested.

When six puppies had been born I gave her lots of encouragement. Chai had to check out his new kids too. This picture shows Cocoa in the bed with the 6 puppies and Chai looking on in fascination.

I took Chai upstairs to jump into bed with my partner and closed the door so Cocoa and I could be downstairs uninterrupted. I went into the next room where I could hear everything, and hopefully grab a few winks, but not be quite so in her face to let her recover and feed the little ones.

Then I heard her licking herself furiously and ran into the kitchen to discover she had already given birth to number 7 and was cleaning it up. Before too long number 8 had arrived. After waiting more than an hour, and taking her outside a couple of times, no more came. I thought cool -- 8 puppies and went back to my nap in the lazy boy suffering the effects of a bit of shell shock. This birthing puppies thing is harder than I expected and I didn't even have to do anything.

When I woke up a couple of hours later I woke up my partner, who had to work, and said come downstairs -- we've got 8 puppies -- "EIGHT!!!" -- yup eight. We got Cocoa to go outside and checked on the puppies but something was wrong; there weren't eight after all but actually ten. I hadn't even heard the last two being born. Here's a picture of them.

Well that's all for this post. The table showing birth times follows, obviously we don't know the exact time the first one was born or the last two but everything happened between bed time on Wednesday night (10:30 pm) and when I woke from my nap at 6:30 am on Thursday.

What a busy night!

Birth Times:

1. around midnight
2. 1:30 a.m.
3. 1:45 a.m.
4. 2:35 a.m.
5. 2:42 a.m.
6. 3:45 a.m.
7. 4:05 a.m.
8. 4:15 a.m.
9. before 6:30 a.m.
10. before 6:30 a.m.