POOP

No, it isn't that nothing has happened. But eight puppies are like too much pie. It loses its shine after a few helpings. Or heapings as the case may be. Which brings me to the first story.

Ah, yes. Who would have thought poop could be funny? Well, it is and it isn't. You'll just have to read the whole thing to plumb the full depths of this humor. Black humor.

It started with weaning, which went well except that the puppies developed diarrhea. Not the fatal kind, just the "pool" kind that's difficult to pick up even with my giant inventory of paper towel.

I read on the Internet that rice is good: switch them completely to rice, cooked with chicken stock, with a little bit of canned pumpkin mixed in. Feed only this for the first day and then gradually introduce kibble again.

First I used up all the arborio rice. I cooked it with organic chicken stock and mixed in some organic pumpkin. It worked - I got many reasonable piles (with actual shape!) of lovely orange poop. The only trouble was sometimes almost mistaking them for toys.

At 5:30 in the morning, I was out of arborio rice and could find no basmati. So I cooked brown rice. That takes 50 minutes -- a long and noisy wait until breakfast. When the stores opened, I bought a box of minute brown rice because brown rice is good for you. After two meals of this, the piles turned back into pools and got bigger and more frequent.

I got so tired of trying to pick up soup that I made a bunch of 3-square thick paper towel piles and took to sitting in the puppy room on Maggie's bench. When a puppy went into squat position, I placed paper towel under its butt.

I also went back to reading, this time from the library vet book which is overdue but I don't care. It said to withhold food for up to 24 hours and then begin with oatmeal or white rice (because it's easy to digest). Well that would explain the rice in the new pools.

So I withheld food for 14 hours and then gave them a meal of oatmeal and pumpkin and I am now waiting for the first orange pile which I will happily clean up while drinking a glass of red wine.