Notes on puppy fostering during monsoons

So, today has been quite a day. Since the last post, the puppies have been growing cuter and bigger and more playful and interactive by the hour, it seems. This is good - but it also brings the possibility of trouble, because they can get into things they shouldn't, and get out of things they should stay in. Like as of today, both Pan and Iorek know how to get out of the dog door. But neither knows how to get back in.

For a long time, Iorek has had this ability - and we've had to keep the pups shut up in their puppy pen at night to make sure he doesn't get out and get stuck. There are owls and hawks who might be able to take a puppy his size, and there's cactus and various other scary stuff out there.

Well, with the monsoons it's nicer during the days - especially mornings and evenings - and these puppies are starting to want to explore more. So we may have to just start shutting them in the pen unless we're there to monitor them. Which will be hard, because they still want to nurse sometimes, and we're not going to lock Roxie in the pen with them. That wouldn't be fair to her. On the other hand, it might help them to figure out that they can stop nursing, and they'll be fine. They're awfully toothy for poor Roxie at this point. But we don't want them to be traumatized by being forced to stop nursing before they, and Roxie, are ready for that.

And the other exciting thing about monsoons is that they have winds, and winds can sometimes knock down the barrier that we put up to keep Roxie from climbing out of the yard. This afternoon we had quite a strong monsoon. Lots of rain, even some hail, and strong winds. Tonight, as John left to go climbing, and I went up for my first post-workday puppy snuggle, I found that Roxie was not in the yard at all. I went out in front of the house, and she came running up to me having been somewhere up the street with Dash and Dot. She came right back into the yard with me just fine, luckily. She's such a good girl about coming when she's called!

As you would expect on a rainy day, she was MUDDY and WET. But what you might not expect is that she smelled like she'd been rolling around in more than one dead thing. Very, very, very, very stinky. And if you touched her, YOU were that stinky.

So, I decided that we needed an emergency bath. I found a recipe for de-stinkifying dog shampoo on the web (hydrogen peroxide, baking soda, and a little bit of liquid soap, recommended for skunk stink removal), whipped it up, and set things up for a dog bath.

This meant putting our other dogs outside, filling the bathtub a few inches with warm water, getting a bucket and some towels ready, and then seeing how things would go. Luckily, Roxie is so agreeable you can even lift her up into a tub of water and scrub her down, and she won't even try that hard to get out. There was a HUGE amount of stinky dirt that came off that dog, but I don't know that she'd been 100% de-stinkified. And I'm worried that she might be itchy as a result of the bath - she was already having a fair amount of itchiness before all this.

But, the bath went fine. And hopefully, we'll be able to continue heading off any disasters as the pups, and Roxie, test us more and more.