pupdate: three weeks old!

Penny’s puppies are now three weeks old, and growing like weeds.  Or fat little milk ticks.  Or healthy, nursing puppies of a very productive, happy, mama.  Whatever analogy you prefer.

Penny and I are fantastic at taking pictures together. Don’t judge.

At three weeks, puppies have their eyes open and are walking around for increasing periods of time.  They are still totally dependent on mama for food.  Penny’s babies are between 3 and 4.1 pounds, depending on which fat, tick of a baby you put on the scale, and all gaining weight at a steady rate.  They are also starting to play with one another, though they fall asleep pretty quickly after short periods of play time.

Andre poking Inigo Montoya

Max playing with his first toy

Humperdinck after his nail trim

We are also getting the puppies used to routine handling and care — being held, patted, tickled, turned on their backs, and getting their nails trimmed.  It is all very obvious when you think about it, but it’s super important to give puppies good, easy, mellow early experiences with handling so that they get used to it early on.  And it’s fun so… ya know.

These two are always close

As they fall asleep after playing they kinda wander towards one another and pile up.  Puppy pillows are the most comfortable pillows, you know!

Those wrinkles!!

At three weeks there’s still no guessing what Dad was (obviously we know what Penny looks like).  Some of the kids are starting to get big, mastiff-y heads, but it’s really too early to tell.  In a few weeks we will have a better idea, but even then, babies of all breeds look far more similar than the adults of those breeds.  So maybe we will know… in a year?

As a random aside, this obviously also holds for species; there’s this saying “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny”.  It means that if you look at the developmental stages of an organism (think fetal development), you can tell their phylogenetic relationships.  Mammalian embryos have gills and a tail to start with, and all of them have hair, whether or not they end up with it!