OMG puppies are just balls of energy!

I am exhausted!

This is the cause:

Meet our new Lab pup. We’ve tentatively named her Midnight, but I’m not sure if that name will stick or not. Names more suitable at this moment vary between Sweetness, Mischief, Trouble, and Chewy. Maybe Chaos would be a good name for her because she’s certainly turned our world Topsy turvy! (if you have any name suggestions for an energetic black puppy let me know.)

On Friday night we drove out to Tilsenberg. Our trip was delayed though. Remember I said we had a really bad snow and ice storm on Thursday? Well it took more than an hour Friday evening to get the ice off the car, and in the process Chris thought he broke one of the windshield wipers so we thought we’d have to replace it before we went on our long drive.

Also, our stupid car seems to seal itself shut in the winter. The rubber liner around the doors freezes and the doors can’t be opened! We had trouble getting into the car to begin with! One thing that helps that problem, that we still haven’t done, is to apply some Vaseline to the rubber around the doors. I’ve got to remind Chris to do that tonight!

It was about 10:30 pm when we finally arrived at the farm. The breeder, Lisa, greeted us when we arrived and she seemed very nice. She walked us out to this absolutely gigantic barn where the puppies were being kept.

As we walked to the barn we passed by the mother and father Labs. They were tied up outside and seemed to be perfectly happy outside in the cold. Both parents were yellow labs and they were friendly and seemed to be fairly well behaved.

The barn held three horses and had a number of empty stables. The couple that owns the farm rents out space to others for their horses.

The pups were in one of the empty stables on a bed of pine shavings. There was a large plywood box in the pen that the pups were using as a shelter. The box/den had a large heat light over it to keep the pups warm and in the pen itself there were two large dishes for water and dog food.

As we walked in the pen our feet were attacked by puppies. Puppies puppies everywhere and man did they like shoelaces!

Here they are attacking Chris’ sandals. (note the fashionable socks and sandals - yes my husband is one of those kind of guys!):

There was a mix of black pups and yellow pups. Chris really liked the male yellow pup at my hand here in this photo and so did I, but it seemed kind of timid and thin:

It took us a long time to pick out a pup, especially as we were constantly battling puppies that were trying to chew our shoes, scarves and anything else they could grab, but we finally decided on Midnight.

We went back to the couples house and filled out some paperwork for her registration papers and then we began the long ride home. I think it was 12:30 am or later by this time!

The puppy was really good in the car. I think the fact that it was so late at night and that the car was dark contributed to her doing so well. She seemed to lightly doze a good portion of the way home.

We got home at about 3:00 or 3:30 am and let the dog roam around a little bit. We eventually turned on the TV while Chris and the pup cuddled on the couch. Chris insisted that we watch PetTV and Midnight seemed to enjoy watching TV. She’d sit up and look at the TV whenever a dog was on.

Around 4 am we went to bed, bringing the pup upstairs and putting her in our medium sized pet carrier for the night. She whined on and off for a while but eventually settled down to sleep until about 7:30 am.

Chris decided to let me sleep and he ended up getting up with the pup and had quite an adventurous few hours before I got up to join them.

Unfortunately, it turned out that our puppy was sick. By the time I got up Chris had cleaned up poop at least 8 times! He was seeing the shredded pine bedding in her stool!

Oh and I forgot to mention that as a result of having been kept on pine shavings she smelled like pine and that got my nose all irritated. I still have a stuffed up nose. I’ve bathed the pup so I’m not 100% sure that the stuffiness was just the pine shavings … maybe it’s my allergies. Chris’ eye has already swollen up once too. Yes we both have allergies to dogs … but if Chris can manage to not rub his eyes we have allergies that we can live with, or at least I hope we can.

At about 3 pm she started having diarrhea and as I cleaned it up I noticed that there were some blood streaks in it so we immediately got the phone book out and tried to find a vet in the area that was open. (we have two vets that we use for our reptile care (box turtles only now) but they are pretty far away so we decided to try to find a vet in the area since it’s much easier to find a dog vet!)

This post is getting really long. I’ll continue our puppy saga in another post later on today … besides … it’s time to take the pup outside for a little adventure in the backyard.