The puppies are all doing well, but Ronnie and I are exhausted already! As is pretty common, since Ellie had a c-section and never truly went into labor (which would have triggered a lot of maternal hormones) and this is her first litter, she basically woke up from the surgery with all these little aliens, and didn't have a clue what to do. In some cases like this, the mother dog will actually try to attack her babies, but fortunately Ellie has been very tolerant. She will lay and let them nurse, but doesn't really want to be with them all the time. That is OK with us, because we made the decision to keep the pups separate from her since there are so many of them, and the risk of her stepping on one, or accidentally laying on it and crushing or severely injuring it. Which means we are putting the pups on her to nurse every couple hours around the clock. (Hence the exhaustion). It would not necessarily require both of us to be up so often, but in another common consequence of an inexperienced mother having a c-section, she is not cleaning the pups.
Newborn puppies can't eliminate on their own, the mother has to lick them to stimulate them to pee and poop. If she's not doing that, the breeder has to stimulate them with a cotton ball dampened with warm water, or a little oil. That is a lot of work for 12 little poopers, so it nearly takes both of us at this point.
What happened?!?
Good thing they're so cute!
Another problem we encountered was trying to let all twelve pups nurse at once. It would be fine, as long as we could keep track and make sure the smaller/weaker puppies got plenty of milk. But we found that was really difficult. So we split the litter, and just had Ellie nurse 6 at a time. That worked well for the puppies, but means we have to get puppies onto her twice as often!
12 puppies is a lot for mom to nurse at one time!!
Six puppies at a time seems to work much better.
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