Puppies!

We got an early Christmas present this year... 6 adorable puppies!

We had seen a new Chocolate Lab-looking dog hanging around the house earlier this fall, so I kept it in the back of my mind that Minnie, our Great White Pyrenees, might be expecting.  I kept looking at her every so often, but didn't notice any great size difference aside from what I expected with winter coming.  Pyrenees' are livestock guardians that are used to life in the highlands of Europe.  They have a double coat of fur because they were bred to work at nighttime and in the bitter cold weather.  Like any other outside animal, they naturally stock up on fur before winter, and shed it in the spring/summer because of the heat.  What I thought was excess fur was actually a bunch of pups.

As we were getting ready to head out the door at the end of November, Ellie, who had been playing outside, came running in saying something about puppy sounds coming from under the porch.  We all went running to the door and very soon, there were 8 eager heads peeking under the porch to get a look at (and a count of) our newest additions!

Try as we may, we just couldn't get a good look at the puppies because of where they were at.  We were only able to confirm, by peeking down through the cracks, that Minnie did indeed have new puppies. We LOVE having baby animals around the farm!  It's such an exciting thing!

A couple days later, when we had time and Minnie was adjusted to her little ones, we found them a new, slightly warmer place. We put them on a nest of hay in a somewhat sheltered part of the barn that had an open door so that our guard dog could still get in and out.  (We've tried locking her in a stall before when we needed to and she literally dug through gravel and under the door to get out.) They were SO cute! They looked like jumbo potatoes with stubby legs when they were born.  After a couple weeks, they morphed into guinea pig looking puppies, still with very thick bodies and short legs. We had 2 girls and 4 boys.  Two black and white, three solid black with white socks and chest, and one adorable brown and white pup that had the markings of a St. Bernard.

The kids spent a lot of time playing with them (even in the very cold weather) and each of them laid claim to a puppy as their own, but obviously, we can't keep all of them.  They'd probably end up eating more than our own family!  So at 6 weeks, we put the fluffy little pups up for adoption.  At that point, they were all eating solid dog food (mixed with warm meat broth... hey, they are out in the cold. It's the least I could do... and, it is very healthy for them).  Within a few days, 5 of the 6 were claimed and taken to their new homes. We were very partial to the St. Bernard-looking boy and if he was the last to go, we probably would have kept him, but he wasn't... The last big, little guy was deep black with white socks and a white bow-tie on his chest.

We felt so bad that he was all alone that I (caved and) told the kids that if he didn't go to a new home soon, we could just keep him. The kids were all excited and had named him Samson. After thinking it through and talking to Paul, it really didn't make sense to keep a puppy in the coldest part of the winter (when the kids are not as likely to go out to play with him). We have no inside dogs, and we not planning to start, so he would have to live outside. We also are not fully fenced in, so I was worried that Minnie would teach him her bad habit of traipsing through the neighboring fields. With that in mind, a lovely family contacted me within the day and asked to see him. I agreed, and off he went to his new family. The kids were not quite as happy as I was, but I filled them in my plan to use the puppy money to get a new male Great Pyrenees puppy later in the year (when the weather's warmer).  Knowing that we'd have a new puppy, and possibly a litter of pups in the future, they were not so disappointed.