An update on the puppies

6:35pm.

I just got up not even an hour ago, and Jen wants me to feed Sammy, because when she got home from a girl's day out with her sister (read: paying bills in Greenville) she didn't have the time. Normally she does it, as a tradition from when the puppies were born and I was crippled by that wart, I couldn't get out to see them. She just did it and did it on her own. But I get out there from time to time - like today.

So I'm filling Sammy's dish up with dry food, and topping it with wet food, and she's barking away at me, like I could possibly move any faster. Sammy is a bitch in both senses of the word: A female dog, and an angry... Well, not woman, but an angry female dog. Maybe not angry, but... Bitchy.

The puppies themselves, the seven that survived the first week, are mobile, bouncing all around, but most choose to stay at the back end of the pen, under the tarp and near the kitty bed we got for Smores (but she never used it, even when we put catnip in it, so the puppies got it). One ventures up to the middle of the pen to watch Sammy eat. They're still too small to eat, themselves.

Two more puppies come near the halfway point, where the water is. It's in a 5 gallon bucket, so they can't reach it, but one seems to use it as cover, you know, stealthy like ninja, like Sammy's not going to notice. The first one is emboldened, and makes a dash for a hanging teat, and Sammy nearly bites the puppy's head off barking at it. And then I yell at Sammy because, you know, she was just barking at me to hurry up with HER food.

But then I realize it's best to leave them be. Sammy seems to know what she's doing. One puppy died, but that's probably because he got stuck in the fence and we didn't catch it. I saved him, but then one died. I'm not even sure the one that got stuck in the fence is the one that died, it's just an assumption. But the other seven are healthy and seem fine. And it's not like Jen's sister's cat, who completely neglected her first batch of kittens and let them die. (Not Jen's sister, the cat - she wouldn't feed them at all and tried to hide them througout the house where they wouldn't be found. Real cruel.)

As I walk in, I hear Sammy bark again, and the whimpering of a puppy...

OK, went out there and got her dish back. I don't fully know why we keep her food dish with her food, outside the pen, but it has something to do with ants. Ants go for the dish, empty or no, and ants aren't good for Sammy or the puppies, something like that.