Reporting in on our babies, who are growing well and thriving under the motherly care of momma Mayhem.

At this age, life is primarily eat and sleep, with a little bit of comfort seeking. This mean moving towards or away from mom and siblings, or towards/away from the heated nest. You might have noticed in some pictures or videos how the puppies are occasionally clustered in the upper left part of the whelping box- that’s because underneath the mat in that corner, a circular heated nest exists! The nest is set to 99F. When the puppies want to get warmer, they go towards the nest or cuddle together. When they want to get cooler, they move away from each other, mom, and the nest and spread out. Puppy fun fact: until they are about 2-2.5 weeks old, puppies cannot thermoregulate internally. They have to get environmental help for heating and cooling. The room temperature itself is around 70F- normal room temp, so that mom can exist and nurse without overheating or getting uncomfortable. That is a really important piece of the puzzle… the biochemical process that creates milk for nursing tends to raise her internal temperature, so if the room itself is too warm, she could get awfully hot and uncomfortable. And, an uncomfortable mom is not one that is able to spend buckets of attention on her puppies.

The puppies are gathered in the nest, but not huddled together…. this must be a comfortable temperature for them.

Here is the first episode of Puppy TV- there is a clip of each puppy all in a series (so about 10 minutes total!) These episodes will get more excting soon, as you’ll see the little eyes and ears are about to open any day now!

Here’s something interesting to consider… even over the course of this short video, you’ll see a difference in puppy energy levels. This is not indicative of some puppies being more active than others. It’s indicative of what happens when you spread out observations over any amount of time at all! The puppies who enter the video near the end are just more sleepy because they were doing their crawling around behind the scenes earlier. So… just another reminder that you can’t really get the sense of anything based on short video clips, and certainly not at this age 🙂