Puppies!

Miss Nell, the dog I am fostering for North Country Animal League, had her puppies today. Thoughtful girl, she did not have them in the wee hours of the morning. I came home at lunchtime to check on her, and she had five nice clean puppies. She went on to have four more. Five boys and four girls, five fawn or brindle, four mostly black like Mama. She did a very, very nice job with them, and everybody is squirming and eating and snoozing in the borrowed wading pool.

They say—those experts in everything—that you shouldn’t name puppies you don’t intend to keep. But they also say that you should identify the puppies some way so that you can track their progress. Many people use rick-rack in loose collars, so the following are names based on rick-rack color:
Cherry, fawn female
Baby Blue, brindle male
Mr Greenjeans, black male with white blaze on chest
Violet, brindle female
Daisy, brindle female with white spot on tope of her head
Snowflake, brindle male
Ringo, black with white ring around his neck
Blackie, black male with white paws only
Sweet Pea, black female

And every single one of them looks like Winston Churchill. Actually, several of them look very, very much like Sharpeis. Do all puppies look like that?

It’s true, I ran out of rick rack colors. But now that we can tell the babies apart, they don’t need the collars, and that’s just as well. We can avoid one danger in their tiny lives.

I expect to be doing laundry roughly forever. And I am a little shocked to realize that I have a dozen dogs in my house, if only for another eight weeks.