Puppies

Hi everybody. We have some eye candy for you today and lots of fun as we introduce you to the spring fling puppies. These are multi-generation Australian Labradoodle puppies and they’re from Van Isle Labradoodles. And these little sweethearts were born on Mother’s Day, so they are just barely two days old. So today we’re going to go through and introduce you to each of the puppies by their collar color and we’re going to give you their weights and give you a little bit of an update on spirit as well. So we’re going to do the puppies in birth order. So I have my notes here with all of their weights. And the first puppy that was born in this litter was this little one here. The first one is a little boy and this is purple collar puppy. Purple color puppy is a handsome little fellow and you can see that he is a beautiful caramel and white color. He has gorgeous markings on his head, very symmetrical, and a really nice pattern on his body. And he is going to be what we call a tuxedo. And when he was born, he weighed 348 grams and he is doing just great. A real sweetheart.

The next puppy to arrive is orange collar and orange collar is a little girl, and she’s just nursing and not too excited about coming out and being introduced. But we’ll talk her into it. There she comes. And she too is very similar in her looks to purple collar boy in that she has some lovely symmetrical markings on her head, but her body color is a little darker. So she’s more of a caramel, as a darker gold caramel. And Ms. Orange Collar, she weighed 320 grams when she was born. So a great size and she’s doing fabulously. And you can see your little tongue sticking out and that’s because I took her off from nursing, and so she’s just thinking, “Hey, where did that go?” So we’ll put her right back into the milk bar so she can go back and carry on from where we interrupted her from.

The next puppy that was born is green collar. Green collar is a black and white boy. If I can just find him here under the little pile of puppies. They’re all a little bit squashed together here in this bed. This is not their normal bed. Normally we have them in the larger whelping box, but we do take them out here for filming purposes. And here’s Mr. Green Collar, such a handsome fellow. And if you’ve watched many of our other Van Isle Labradoodles videos, you’ll know that my favorite color pattern is the black with the white abstract markings such as Mr. Green Collar has. So he is going to be an absolutely gorgeous boy. He has that beautiful white on his head, just a stunning puppy. And Mr. Green weighed 350 grams when he was born on May the 12th. Very handsome fellow.

And after him is black collar puppy. And black collar puppy is right over here. And black is also a female and she’s nursing. There we go. And again, she’s more of this beautiful golden caramel color and she too has all these beautiful white markings. You can see the lovely white on her head and the white on her paws. So she is going to be a stunning little girl. And Ms. Black Collar came in at 309 grams. And so out of all of the puppies, in the first four, she was the lightest out of the first four. Generally we start at a fairly high birth weight and tend to go down as the puppies come out, but you’ll see in this litter that it varies quite a bit. So that’s Ms. Black collar.

After that we had another girl and that was gray collar girl and she is somewhere over here. Oh yes, lots of protest. Everybody is complaining. Come here baby girl. Gray collar girl is also a black and white puppy and you’ll see that she has that same stunning markings that are brother has, the beautiful white on her head and the white paws and quite a bit of weight on the body, there in the chest. So really a pretty look. And gray collar girl weighed 315 grams when she was born, so she was heavier than her brother. Green collar there. Let her go find a spot again.

And then next was red collar girl. Now, red collar girl is the only puppy in the litter who is chocolate and she is also the only phantom. So as being a phantom, you can see how she has a lighter color on the front of her legs and she has that over her eyebrows and she also has that lighter color right showing underneath her bum. So those are called 10 points or phantom markings. And then she also has all of these beautiful white marks as well, so on her head and on her paws. So she’s going to also be a really gorgeous girl. Phantom is a highly desirable color that many people really like and though some people really don’t like them, you see those markings in other breeds such as Yorkies, Rottweilers, Dobermans, and they’re all referred to differently, but basically they’re tam points. And red collar girl way 320 grams when she was born. So she was a really good size.

And the next little baby that was born was brown collar. Brown collar is a boy and he is another one of these beautiful soft caramels. He’s a little lighter than the other ones that we saw, so he is just going to have the prettiest markings. Now, these may darken up as he gets older and the caramel part be a little bit more pronounced. And again, gorgeous markings on the head. This puppy is actually what we call a tuxedo with full white on his legs and there is white around his neck as well. And Mr. Brown Collar came in weighing 275 grams, so he’s one of the smaller puppies and you can see he’s quite quiet. He’s not quite as outgoing and lively as some of the other ones quite yet, but he’ll get there.

And last but not least was our yellow collar girl and she is in here somewhere. I think she’s right underneath here. Yes, there she is. Way at the bottom of the pile and we’ll just bring her out. Hello sweetheart. There she is. There’s little yellow collar girl, similar color, similar markings, again, that beautiful, fun shade of caramel and she’s looking to try and nurse off of my hands there. And she has this really distinct diamond shape on the top of her head there. A beautiful blaze. Really a pretty girl. And yellow weighed 253 grams when she was born. So she was the smallest puppy and the last puppy, and that’s entirely normal.

So you’ll see how all the puppies are piled up here with spirit all at the milk bar, gray collar girl’s going in the wrong direction. Now normally, we don’t have her in this bed, so she’s able to spread out a little bit more and the puppies can access both sides of the milk bar. So they’re all able to get in and nurse as Spirit has 10 spots at her milk bar, so with eight puppies, that’s great. There’s lots of room for everybody there. And you’ll see at the frontier, yellow and gray are both not nursing right now. And that happens. They’ll sometimes be a puppy over here and there, they’re not nursing and the rest of them will be at the milk bar.

The Spirit herself you can hear and maybe see that she’s panting quite a bit. And there’s a couple of reasons for that. The main reason is because she is feeding her puppies. Lactating for eight babies it is a lot of hard work and that causes her temperature to be a little higher and for her to be panting. She’s actually sweating while she works. She’s working that hard. It’s also considerably warmer than it normally would be for these little ones. So we have it at 22 degrees, which is a comfortable temperature for Spirit and safe enough for the puppies that they stay warm. The puppies have no ability to regulate their body temperature yet, so it’s important that everything’s warm for them. They also can’t see and they can’t hear and they aren’t able to go to the bathroom by themselves. So Spirit’s responsible for all of those things.

The only sense that the puppies have right now is their nose and they use that nose to find Spirit and find the milk bar, and they are incredibly adept at doing that. So Spirit gets up and goes out for a walk as she does many times during the day. When she comes back into the whelping area and lays down, they’re able to locate where she is and go and start feeding right away. So right now all the puppies do is sleep and eat, and that’s it, and they eat more than anything else because their job is to grow. And with next week’s update, we will likely have found that most of the puppies will have doubled their birth weight. That’s our goal within the first 10 days is to get these puppies to double their birth weight. It’s amazing how fast they grow and even the fact that they’re just two days old and they can already push one another around, they’re already jockeying for a position within the litter.

Spirit herself, you would never even know she’d have puppy. She’s so fully recovered. She goes outside, she runs around, she chases rabbits already. She doesn’t leave the puppies for too long, but because she’s an experienced mom, she will go out for a good 10 to 15 minutes at a time once a day. So she likes to come down the back with all the other dogs. She runs around, she likes to smell everything and see what’s going on and be part of the regular routine. So we like to encourage her to be as much a part of that routine as possible. Hey sweetheart, you’re such a good girl. She had a really easy delivery. Everybody came quickly. There was no hitches and no hangups. She’s eating really well. She has a terrific appetite and she’s just in a great mood. So that’s your update for the very first look at the spring fling Labradoodle puppies. I think they’re enjoying their life with Spirit and even though it’s a rainy day on Vancouver island today, I think these puppies just think it’s great to be born in beautiful British Columbia and enjoying the spring weather that we’ve had lately. Not that they’d been outside yet, but at least they get a little scent of it when their mom comes in from outside.

So we hope you enjoyed the video. If you have any questions about the puppies, please post them in the comments below. I’m happy to answer them for you and we’ll see you again next week.