I’ve been absent for the past several weeks trying to get ready for these guys:

The end of January Cora came into heat and I bred her to a beautiful yellow Lab out of Maryland, Ch Gateway’s Nothin’ But Trouble. He’s won many dog shows and he’s got a great personality. So step by step we got closer to her due date, which was supposed to be April 2^nd. I could tell, almost immediately, that she was pregnant. She thickened up quickly, got some rosey nipples and then started moving very carefully. But, I wouldn’t know for sure until about day 28 to day 35 whether she was truly pregnant. On day 35, I got to see this when we ultrasounded her!

I didn’t look for how many pups she had, because ultrasound puppy counts are notoriously inaccurate. All I wanted to see was one fetus that said she was pregnant. And I did. I continued to train her and take her on searches. But, about five weeks into her pregnancy, she turned to give me “the look”. It was the same one she gave me the last time she was pregnant. It said, I am done, my body is too big to this anymore and I just want to go home to the couch. So that’s what she did. Just about the same time, though, my search team started getting call after call after call for searches. I went on 4 cadaver searches with Finn in 4 weeks. And one of my other team mates made her first live find, of a little girl that went missing overnight down in Bedford, VA.

One week prior to her scheduled due date this what she looked like:

And the waiting continued. On March 26^th, I took a radiograph her to do a puppy count. I counted 7 pups, but others counted as many as 10 puppies.

The weekend of March 27^th, I had a friend help me move the behemoth of a whelping box into my laundry room, having been turned into the puppy room for the duration. I moved everything out of the laundry room and scrubbed everything down. Cleaned the stall mats that I put down to cushion the box away from the floor, dragged them in and then the box was placed on top.Nearly put my back out doing all that. I wanted to cut a piece of linoleum to put on the bottom of the box, and I thought I had a couple of days to complete that task. Oops, though, that was not to be.

I went on my morning rounds, seeing several sick animals. All the while just wanting to get home to check on her. I wasn’t really expecting anything, but she was so close and she had acted a little off first thing in the morning. Her main oddity was the fact that she ate breakfast a little more slowly than what was normal for her. She wasn’t nesting, because nesting for her means ripping things to shreds. None of that happened. So I left feeling pretty secure that it wasn’t going to happen today.

When I got home, I was greeted at the door by a very worried Finn and a couch that was doubling as a whelping box! Two pups already born, a mess on the couch and a very distressed and upset Cora. I picked up both pups, one still attached to the placenta and the other not breathing. I wasn’t able to save the pup that wasn’t breathing, so I concentrated on the one that was still with us. Over the next 3 hours I helped her have another five pups, one of which didn’t make it either. He got his head stuck in the way of another pup that was trying to get out and had his oxygen cut off. The rest of the whelping was uneventful and Cora and I ended up with five beautiful pups, all yellow.

Six days later everyone is doing well and all have more than doubled their birth weight. Even my runt.