Raven is doing great! She lost some weight while she was feeding the puppies, but since has gained it all back. She also lost a decent amount of fur, but part of that could be due to the change of seasons since one of my other dogs is also shedding heavily right now.

That’s a great tip. Luckily for us our vet tech has delivered hundreds if not thousands of litters and she works with us to make sure everyone in the litter is healthy.

Sorry for the late response. A few of the exercises we were doing with the puppies is brushing their coats (we used a tooth brush to brush them when they were little), making different noises by ruffling a paper bag and a plastic bag, handling them with latex gloves, touching all 4 paws, ears, tail, cradling, cutting nails…those were most of the things we did during the early stages. As they got older we added other exercises. I’ll see about writing a more extensive blog post in the future.

Another one of the puppies got a UTI and I had her on antibiotics for 10 days. The UTI wasn’t as worrisome since she wasn’t losing weight, but still stressful.

I’m only raising one of these puppies as a service dog the others will go to homes as pets. Unfortunately, I just don’t have the help (I need puppy raisers if anyone out there is interested) or resources to raise and train more than one puppy at this time.

Are all these pups going to be service/guide dog puppies in training?

Yes! Falken is doing great now. He’s a little undersized compared to the others, but I think he’ll catch up in the coming weeks. We had a second puppy get what we believe to be a UTI. Not as urgent as Falken’s ailment and luckily we were able to use the same antibiotics to help little Pippin.

This is my second litter with Raven and she’s a great mother. She takes care of nearly everything until the puppies are about 5 weeks old. Puppies are adorable from 5-8 weeks old, but they are a ton of work. As one of my friends said after leaving the puppies for an hour or two when you get home it looks like the place got hit by a Poopnado! (she actually didn’t call it poop…)

I’ve never raised newborn puppies, but I have adopted an 8-week old puppy. One puppy at eight weeks is a lot of work, I can’t imagine how much work an entire litter of newborns must be!