On May 15, all my years of studying Irish Wolfhounds culminated in the birth of my very first litter. 7 healthy pups; one stillborn. Sage was a great mom and whelped easily and everyone started gaining weight immediately.
On May 17 two of the puppies died within a few hours, and on May 18 another one died. Just about killed me. I had an experienced breeder who is a vet tech here to help with the whelping and she was blindsided, too. We did necropsies and they had gone septic. Could have picked up infections while being born ... we'll never know the for sure. Nor do we know why the other 4 survived.
By the time of this shot, I had smacked myself into focussing on what I had instead of what I had lost, and got the camera out as often as possible. Many of the early pictures are snapshotty, but very precious to me. The quality of the puppy images will improve over the next few days :-)
I know this is Lido because I had little collars of colored rickrack for the pups so I could tell them apart at a glance. As newborns they can look remarkably similar from above. Lido weighed just over a pound at birth and is still here, napping as I type. Um, he's bigger now. A LOT bigger ;-)
Oh, and the naming scheme for this litter was "One," so Lido is One for the Road (from the Boz Scaggs song The Lido Shuffle) and Millie, my other keeper pup, is One in a Million. The pups who went to other homes were Bonnie (One Day at a Time) and Corrigan (One Wrong Turn for a big kink in his tail; his new family renamed him Rooney).
Oh so sorry to hear you had such a rough time. I would have been torn up also. My little girl only had 3 shih tzu pups and luckily they all survived. I would have been devastated if I lost any. I am an emotional person. But you had the right attitude in the end. Great portrait of a cute little pup.
So hard to see detail because of the black but I stood up and looked down at my monitor and oh, my, what a cutie. Sorry about the others but it's clear that you get much joy from your "keepers".
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