The mother of our puppies' siblings said that for her it resulted in the puppies sleeping longer, the beds staying less messy, and going longer periods between feedings.
None of that happened for me, except the beds staying cleaner (of course, because only one was pooping and peeing in any given bed at any given time!).
In one respect, it was very nice because I am well aware of the soothing properties of sucking and didn't want to deny my puppies that crutch, so I spent most of the day either feeding puppies, or taking them, one on one, into my lap and letting them suck on whatever uncovered body part of mine they wanted. (Fingers, mostly, but some arm flesh was sucked on as well)
While Max and Patty didn't seem to mind their lonely cages, Laverne hated her cage. In truth, she had the smallest one, since I only have two cages and so she was in the plastic carrying crate, which only has one small side you can look out of. She did the most complaining.
At their mid-day feeding, I switched Patty to the traveling crate and put Laverne in the larger cage and that seemed to work better.
But then I started getting messages from people encouraging me to put the puppies back together again, talking about the value of that interaction with siblings and how adult dogs who had been raised as singletons often had emotional problems because they didn't get enough sucking as puppies.
Someone told me about using pacifiers to help and I decided I would get some tomorrow.
But in the meantime, after their evening feeding, I put them all back together into the one big cage. Within 5 minutes, I had taken this photo, thinking what a great Photo of the Day it would make
But only a few minutes later, I got an even better Photo of the Day, as I think you will agree if you check it out below.
I think that they are glad to all be together again.
I did something today that I never thought I would ever do. I unfriended someone on Facebook. In fact, three someones (one got unfriended by being the spouse of the person I was really angry with).
While I don't want to go into details about what prompted the unfriending, suffice to say that the main reason was that I didn't want these persons to be reading anything I write again. At least one of them, and possibly two, have infuriated me beyond belief, and hurt someone I love very much. I learned this from a third party today and I just don't want to ever have anything to do with any of them again.
It has been a very long time since I've been this angry at any individual.
2 comments:
The contradictory advice about keeping the puppies together or not is like listening to all the advice one hears about the best way to raise babies.
Because they were such opposites and yet, I noticed that kids grew up anyway, I stopped paying so much attention and did what was right for me. Mostly, that has worked. I'll best you did the same thing!
I'm in love with the photos. It is now my screensaver :)
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