Okay, so, on Saturday, I thought, “You know, I bet I can finish this revision of No Foreign Sky today!”
Honestly, I don’t know why I ever have thoughts like that. I should know better. Even the back of my brain, optimist as it apparently is, ought to know better.
Maybe by this time next week. I’m tempted to say “Definitely,” but let’s not have another iteration of over-optimism. I have three basic elements I’m focusing on. They are the hardest three elements, which is why I left them for last. Not intrinsically hard, but picky and detailed. I guess the good news, such as it is, is that I’ll mostly be skimming across half the chapters and making minimal changes to the other half. It’s just that minimal changes still take maximum minutes, or so it sometimes seems.
Meanwhile:
I can’t resist a puppy lying on … hmm … her back. That’s one of the tricolor girls. You see how very, very heavily all three tricolors are marked. The one on her back has a big white bar across her hips. That’s how I tell her apart.
She was one of the two smallest puppies at birth — six ounces. She’s now the second biggest puppy. About twenty-six ounces. So she’s gone up about twenty ounces in nineteen days: wow. Well, the girls have been no trouble at all.
The b/t boy is now gaining just fine on his own with no help from me. I don’t think he’s going to be a problem again (knocking on wood!). The tri boy is still a bit of a problem, but not much. I gave him twelve cc’s of formula last night, all at one time, to kick him along a bit. If he were an orphan, he’d be getting about 120 cc’s of formula per day, or more, so you see that this wasn’t a lot. He then gained properly overnight and this morning, so we’ll see how he does for the rest of the day. I’m going to try him on just a bit of formula off my fingertip tonight as a precursor to trying him on formula-soaked puppy kibble in a few days.
Meanwhile! They are all actually developing really fast. All but the ruby girl wobbled up to their feet around two weeks — very early for Cavalier puppies. She is up now too, she is just really fat and it slowed her down. They are all showing a little bit of play behavior now, mouthing each other and my finger with their tiny toothless mouths. They stay awake for a full minute or so after nursing, playing a little and wobbling around, and then collapse and sleep till time to nurse. Impossible to see anything about their individual personalities yet, but you sure see species-specific play behavior. They grab each other’s ears and do that sideways jerk that will someday kill a rabbit if they catch one.
Morgan would like to be done with nursing. She would absolutely wean them today if she could. But, of course, I can’t let her, not quite yet. I did trim their invisible but sharp claws — you have to do it by feel because heaven knows you can’t see a thing; the claws are so very tiny. But they were scratching her up, I’m pretty sure that’s why she’s decided she doesn’t want to nurse them even though they don’t yet have teeth. She’s also nursing sitting up so that they mostly have to keep their feet on the bedding. Well, it won’t be long, and she do the fun part of being a mother — playing with them. She nudges them now, but of course they just fall over.
Just about two weeks till we hit Ultimate Cuteness. IMO, Ultimate Cavalier Puppy Cuteness hits at five weeks and lasts till around ten weeks.
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