MAY 26, 2022
The pandas aren’t even gone yet and now some whittle rats?!
Late at night at the turn of the week, I received a text that gave me deja vu goosebumps. An emaciated mama dog, who spent all her life on a chain, delivered puppies in a fellow foster home and was in no shape to care for them. I didn’t blink before agreeing to take the babies.
As I walked in to retrieve them, I saw two seasoned animal rescuers handling a difficult and exhausting foster gig with the utmost love and compassion. We pet mama together as they described the abject conditions from which she came. I remember when I had to make the call these fosters made, when Molina couldn’t be a mom, when things didn’t go as planned and I was, all the sudden, no longer just a witness to the miracle of life.
Your Walk with Me donations are making it possible to do the work I love, and caring for these little babies means a great deal to me. You afforded the $60 can of formula I needed on our way to Crazy Town and which I feed them round the clock. I have never been so grateful to be so tired.
MAY 30, 2022
Although it feels like the longest day ever, the calendar says the sun has indeed risen 7 times, and my newest orphaned babies are a week old.
They are eating well and gaining weight, but those bellies haven’t come without a fight.
It’s a battle of the wills, folks, and I intend to win. While I have nothing personal against the sport of genital suckling, it does nothing to nourish a growing baby dog. Genital suckling is natural behavior in many orphaned neonates who spend their waking time rooting around for food. Mistaking a siblings’ junk for Mom’s nipple is problematic and dangerous because it stimulates the puppy to urinate, so then all involved parties are soaked with pee and require bathing to avoid urine burns. The suckler fills up on empty calories, the sucklee ends up with swelling and trauma, and the MOM can’t keep up with that much laundry!
Unlike Molina’s litter, there is no main culprit in this trio, which was revealed when Bessie went to weiner licker jail and Jessie still ended up with a swollen rectum. It was confirmed that Dessie was the (only possible) offender when she emerged with a, gasp, poopy snoot!
100% of the puppies are in jail now, some “cells” are nicer than others, the latest being a ghetto fabulous tote incubator. It’ll work for the short term and tonight it’ll buy me 3.5 hours of consecutive sleep, but it’s time to make some upgrades in neonatal intensive care.
Anyone who feels inclined to pitch in on operation “stifle the suckle” or even help with formula, hire me to walk your dog! I’m also putting links below. Thank you for supporting me in doing the work I love!
MAY 31, 2022
There’s always one #bottlebaby who needs a little more care than all the rest.
JUNE 14, 2022
Because I am a September baby, my parents had the option of starting me in school early, and because of so many of my “behaviors” they jumped at the opportunity to put me on the bus.
I got to first grade and the wheels fell off. For starters, I didn’t get math. The teacher, Bonnie Bell (I’ll never forget her name because of the chapstick,) put big red sad faces on my work. I was only 5, trying hard and struggling harder. The sad faces did nothing but confirm my feelings of failure and I can still see them in my mind’s eye. I cried in my mom’s lap every day after school and eventually she got me out of that lady’s class, she pulled me out of the school, and I went to kindergarten for the second time with my former teacher’s antithesis. Ms. Allen was love. She was kind. She was a nurturer and she even came to one of my swim meets. She’s the reason I can recite the alphabet backwards. I was awarded student of the month that year. It was healing for a little baby to succeed in school.
And you know what? Math ended up being my favorite subject and I excelled in it, especially in college. It must have been hard for my parents to make the decision to put me back in kindergarten as opposed to just switching me to a decent 1st grade teacher. They must have seen that the chapstick lady, though brutal, was not the issue. I just wasn’t ready. I wasn’t ready to be in the first grade.
And now as my fat potatoes are weaning, one special little girl still lags behind. She’s been peculiar and has needed extra care since day one. When the other two neonates were moving into bigger bottles, I had to move her down and feed her more often. Despite a strong suckle, she wasn’t always able to consume enough calories through the bottle, so I put a tube in her tummy and took over when she needed me to. She sat and cried, confused, when it was time to start eating like a big girl, and sometimes she sneezed a little slurry out of her nose. She wants to eat, but she just isn’t ready to get in there and chow down like the others.
Still she’s learning, but at her own pace, and that’s perfectly acceptable in Crazy Town. She learned to lap, and she’ll even consider doing it sometimes, but only from my hand. She loved the slurry, but it was too wet for her and unappealing in a bowl or a plate or a lick mat, and she sneezed more. She cried and cried as the fat spuds ate, so I had no choice but to go FULL BORE Rio’s mom on her.
My little girl seems to be more successful when she eats with her head in a certain position, and with the help of my handy dandy blowtorch and Rio’s Nutribullet, I customized the menu especially for her, and modified a nipple so she can eat it from a bottle with her neck fixed just the right way.
Long as she keeps being weird, I’ll keep being weird with her. She has grit!
JUNE 18, 2022
Quenelles for the win! I am so tired of washing bottles, this is a victory for me as much as it is for my weirdo baby girl. Yay weaning!
JUNE 21, 2022
“We turned 4 weeks old on Sunday, which means we got head shots and leg shots, but since you guys keep our mom in teeeeny tiny injection needles, we didn’t even feel them.”
Meet the potatoes! I had to give my baby girl a late-maturing namesake, so evvvvveryone got a potato name.
JUNE 25, 2022
THEY MAKE HOMELESSNESS LOOK LUXURIOUS” (IG POST)
JULY 2, 2022
Baby Elba took a solo ride yesterday. She met Minor the dog and some nice new people, and… she napped.
Thank you, Shalan, for making sure the orphanage has the best toys, and for being such a wonderful friend to all the puppies you’ve helped to socialize.
JULY 11, 2022
Well, guys, there aren’t any appealing visuals from the last few days in Crazy Town where my little potatoes were hit with explosive diarrhea, but this morning feels a bit like an emergence.
Blazer was hit with it first, so he went to critical care. Then Ida Rose went down, so they’re bunking together next to my bed under a bag of lactated ringers. And little Elba, my tiny-but-spunky girl, held out the longest, but ultimately she fell ill too.
We are literally blowing through every donation you all have made. Several of you recently gave me puppy pads and saved my sanity — I was especially grateful to have them when my washer broke.
This morning, everyone appreciated the mom’s homemade chicken and rice gruel and even some chicken broth, so please let us hope we are on our way back up!
JULY 15, 2022
We made it through a literal diarrhea storm and although I once again failed at documenting it real time, I did (mostly by happy accident) get enough media for a glimpse behind-the-scenes.
I learned a bunch. I got enough interesting stool samples to blow out my back bent over the microscope and textbook, completely captivated.
Pillows and cushions from the thrift shop made excellent disposable beds, saline flushes donated by a beloved Walk with Me client saved the day when I needed fluid off hours, and I had to employ some of the culinary tricks I honed for my Rio.
Thank you for all the ways you support the work that means so much to me. You’re the reason I am able to care for them without lowering my standards, and for that I am monumentally grateful.
Farewell, feculence!
I do not own the rights to this music, but c’mon, Johhnnnn. It’s for the animals!
JULY 20, 2022
Blazer, Elba, and Ida Rose are scheduling interviews for their permanent jobs. They have lots of skills and fewer annoying tendencies thanks to Mama Ellen, Daddy Jax and the rest of the pack (Even Hooch!)
Please get in touch if you want to see them in action on the evolving DIY jungle gym I made from donated/thrifted items and Rio’s PT equipment.
JULY 21, 2022
Ellen is happy to teach swim lessons as long as she’s doing the swimming.
Thank you, Grammie, for the pool delivery!
JULY 22, 2022
Bottle babies are a special kind of foster. They’re here for at least two months and I bond to them intimately because of the care they require. They can’t even pee on their own in the beginning. At the outset, the fate of these babies is often questionable. In the case of the potatoes, their mom lived outdoors on a chain and she was starving. She didn’t have enough food for herself, let alone any babies. Some of her puppies didn’t develop, others were stillborn. She was exposed to every parasite, bug, bacteria and otherwise foul organism and denied her basic needs. If she weren’t limited by a metal noose, she might have sought better options. Chessie, ironically Slavic for “at peace,” was desperate.
I imagined a baby Rio while I greeted the one-day-old potato babies, wondering if they’d suffer similar consequences. 8 weeks later I’m looking back on the hard parts, the tired parts, the parts that made me worry, and making the play place is the reward. These babies are strong and confident and playful! I am especially sentimental about Elba because, frankly, I thought she was doomed.
Elba had a raspy nose from the second I met her. No snot, just a sort of raspy whistle. She’d suckle a bottle for 15 minutes without drinking a drop. Other times she’d sneeze formula out of her nose. Most fickle babies improve with slurry and sometimes I am inclined to fast track them to weaning, but I was still intermittently tube feeding Elba when the others were lapping. My trusty blowtorch melted a hole in a perfectly good nipple and Elba started weaning with a thick (WARMED) slurry delivered out of a bottle with her neck slightly extended. No sneezes. It took her twice as long as the others to get started, but she just … caught up. She’s hilarious. She’s fearless. She’s in no way “behind” her siblings. In fact, she’s the one who always initiates a three way game of tug and she exclusively plays with toys twice her size.
The puppy play space is a work in progress, but it’s coming along and finding all the pieces, making the games and challenges and obstacles — it’s like reliving a puppyhood I never had. I cannot help but share their joy. My babies are exploring, discovering, solving problems and interacting with their world; they’re learning through play. The big dogs get to go out and find all the hidden food the puppies missed, and Hooch was, dare I say, amped up about it this evening.
JULY 26, 2022
False advertising during field trips. Honk if you see me!
JULY 26, 2022
Elba. 100% always follows the rules.
https://www.facebook.com/reel/3291238797774415
JULY 28, 2022
Now I know why Elba’s been escaping. She needs to snuggle with Hooch!
JULY 28, 2022
My babies are spending the night in the shelter in order to board the early bus to neuter town. Blazer and Ida Rose will return to the orphanage after surgery tomorrow as they have meet and greets scheduled this weekend.
But this is goodbye for little Elba. She hasn’t had any luck on the internet or in public, so she’ll stay at the shelter until Saturday when she’ll ship off to their adoption event in hopes someone decent will walk in and scoop her up.
Good luck, sweet babies. And good luck, my Elba. Thanks for everything you taught me.
JULY 29, 2022
“We didn’t get surgery today and the vet called us snotty, so Mom came and got us.”
I had to giggle when I got the news that my babies couldn’t be altered today because of snot that no one else can see. I imagined the vet examining Elba, who has had an intermittently funny sounding nose since birth, deeming her sickly and subsequently nixing the whole litter.
I don’t know if that’s the case, but it’s plausible. And if it’s true, then I say to them, she got me too.
That funny sounding nose kept me up every few hours for a month. That nose made me question whether she was sick and going to develop pneumonia at 1 day old. The nose that made it difficult for her to eat safely when she was just a baby. The nose that needed a mom who likes to solve weird problems.
Better safe than sorry. We’re all on Doxy and no one is offended after I clarified for Elba that “snotty” is not a euphemism for bitch. She can be so touchy.
AUGUST 1, 2022
The girls were busy wrastlin’, …
https://www.facebook.com/reel/2457752057700728/
AUGUST 3, 2022
I was testing a lens on my phone camera and if this isn’t a sign I should play the lottery….
I managed to toss the treat into Jax’s ear — something I couldn’t do again if I tried— and he flings it out and looks at me like “DID YOU SEE THIS MAGIC?!”
AUGUST 5, 2022
Take two for the taters.
My sweetest little babies are off to be “fixed” today. Make no mistake, they were never broken. They’ve been the portrait of perfection since I met them at one day old. Even oddball Elba, pictured here in frog pose, sunning herself while her siblings, Ida Rose and Blazer, nap.
Puppies have a way of putting me in a rhythm and since the end of May, their needs have been the center of my focus.
What was a mom to do while her babies spent last night at the shelter? I laid awake plotting the next upgrade to the pupper play space, giggling at Hooch, who was snoring in Rio’s bed, upside down, without Elba trying to get his tail.
AUGUST 5, 2022
Everyone made it through surgery and they’re all relieved to be home, in Rio’s bed, the best spot in the orphanage.
AUGUST 6, 2022
Hooch: “HOWWWW many times do I have to tell you? I love you, but I am NOT your long lost dad.
Elba: “but….we match!”
Hooch:
AUGUST 7, 2022
Ida Rose is the first spud to reach her permanent address! I already knew her mom, Lisa, was our person, and as she nearly cried at the sight of her new puppy, I teared up becasue of her shirt.
That’s love.
Ida Rose has a big sister named Storm who is already showing her how proper dogs live, and I have a new friend in Lisa.
I suspect we’ll see them again, but for now, congratulations to our graduate and to the whole pack!
AUGUST 8, 2022
Blazer is officially a Maryland boy!! He’s staying in Crazy Town until his new family returns from vacation, so we’re low key partying today…
AUGUST 10, 2022
Oh, Elba. Happy graduation day! May you never be normal. 😛
AUGUST 11, 2022
We had a wild ride, but baby Elba has landed herself in love!
Her new family reports she transitioned seamlessly into her new life, which includes a canine big brother, two human playmates and two wonderful parents, all of whom she’s schmoozing.
Her new mom writes,
“First night went well. We are overjoyed & she’s learning boundaries with her new brother Argos.
She was so happy to meet him & this morning her tail was wagging when he came outside with her.
She took right to her crate & already knows she can go in there when she needs to get a minute away from Argos sniffing her constantly or from us petting her. She slept in the crate with out any protest. She’s the snuggliest & bestest girl! ”
Elba is the second potato to choose her crate the first night home. Ida’s mom reported the same.
A little familiarity in a new environment, that little comfort of eating your mom’s cold leftovers in your dorm room. That’s what I offer my little Crazy Town graduates!
Congratulations, Baby Elba. Thanks for the humdinger of a challenge during weeks 1-4. You taught me a lot, you weirdo, and I love you!
Congratulations to the new family!
AUGUST 14, 2022
Blazer practicing his skills and manners at @carlsfrozencustard last night!
AUGUST 14, 2022
They’re just little babies. We can’t expect them to know anything we don’t adequately teach them.
https://www.facebook.com/reel/432231585358040/
AUGUST 17, 2022
Wook at that wittle guy go!
AUGUST 18, 2022
Blazer hasn’t even made it to his new address, but has already started living his best life in the car!
Congratulations, my boy!!! You made it out of Crazy Town!
