Today was the day that the kitties had their attitude adjustments. We dropped them off early in the morning and left them at the clinic all day. The puppies didn't really notice too much. Miss M glanced at the kitties' bathroom a couple of times to see if they were there. Most days, the cats find a nice cozy place to sleep for hours on end, so not seeing them isn't unusual.
As the afternoon progressed, the sky started getting darker and darker. We got a call around 4 letting us know that the cats were in recovery and would be ready soon. On the way to pick them up, the sky sprang a leak. Okay, really it opened up and was raining so hard that we could hardly see the road. There were deep puddles in the outer lanes of the road. Idiots in big pickup trucks kept flying through the puddles at normal speeds, sending huge waves of water flying. By the time we went 10 feet from the car to the door of the clinic, we were both soaked. The lightening was near constant and was so close, the thunder followed almost immediately. One of the vet techs at the front desk was visibly nervous and jumped several times with the thunder.
When we got home, we kept the puppies all in their crates until we could get the cats situated. The kitties kept to themselves for a while, sleeping in a nice safe hiding spot. Finally, Kitty S came slowly into the kitchen while Miss M was helping Mom get the puppies' dinner ready. Miss M whimpered a little and wagged her tail. We think she was worried about the cats and really wanted to play with them. Of course, playing was out of the question. 
Kitty P jumped up on our bed to take a nap for a while in the evening and was doing well until we noticed her aggressively pulling at the residue around the incision site. We were hoping to not have to use the cone of shame, but we couldn't have her messing with her incision. So on it went. She doesn't like it at all. Kitty S hasn't messed with hers too much so far. She has mostly been sleeping, only coming out to get a little something to eat in the kitchen and then going right back to her safe place. We hope that she won't have to go in the cone, but we will have to see how she does tonight. 
The puppies seem to know something is up with the kitties and were fairly nervous when we got home. I think the hardest part of the next week or two will be having to keep the kitties and puppies apart. 
We don't have any pictures of Kitty P in her cone yet. We will try to take some tomorrow to post.
On a different note, apparently, Kitty P had an infection in her uterus, Pyometra, that we didn't know about. This is a life threatening illness that is most commonly found in older animals. We had noticed that Kitty P was fairly small and not growing very quickly, but just thought she was a small type of cat. She didn't have any other symptoms that we could tell. She slept quite a bit, but all cats sleep a lot. She wasn't throwing up and all of their stools were normal. Had we not gotten her spayed when we did, we wouldn't have even known about the infection. We were glad they caught it. We have to give her antibiotic drops for the next week as a precaution.

After what seems like ages, we finally went back to puppy school today. The puppies were so excited they could hardly contain themselves. They knew just where to go. If we had been on roller blades, they would have pulled us straight through the automatic door. It was so steamy outside, they led us straight to the water fountain, after stopping to say hi to the trainer on the way.

The puppies absolutely love puppy school! We really like puppy school too. It is more than just a place to go to learn how to sit and stay. You really learn a lot about your dogs when you go through training with them. You get a chance to see their personalities come out, and they get a chance to show you how good they can be and how much they can learn. Training with them really does seem to bring you and your dogs even closer. Notice in the picture above how Miss B is learning the skill they are working on, but checks back in with us. She is full of energy and can be quite the rascal, but in reality, she is really smart and just gets bored quickly. Despite her rascal-ness, she wants nothing more than to please us and is happy to do things without treats as long as we tell her she's a good girl and she knows we are happy.

The girls remembered just where Ms. A keeps her treats.

After school, we let the puppies play in the water hose to cool off before taking a nap.

Summers here in Texas can be brutal. Even when it is only 90 outside, with the humidity, it usually still feels like the temperatures are in the triple digits. Sometimes when it is really hot and the puppies play, we pull out the water hose so that they can cool off a little before taking them inside. 
Water is water, right? So then why is it that when I pull out the water hose, the puppies go crazy, but when I run bath water, I get the reaction below?

Miss B has loved the water hose since she was little and loves playing in the mud and getting dirty. Unfortunately for her, she hates taking a bath. She will tolerate it once she's in the tub, but getting her there is another story. Miss S is just the opposite. She doesn't really like the water hose, but will get in the bathtub all by herself if you don't lift her in fast enough.
Miss M thinks we need to play with the water hose every time we go outside now. Even when it's raining.

I don't really mind playing with them in the water because I get to cool off too. Normally, it is just plain steamy outside. On top of that, the mosquitoes are so bad, that we still have to wear long sleeves just to keep the mosquitoes at bay. The only tricky part about playing in the water is that once you start, the puppies don't want to stop and go inside. They really are like 2 year old children. If puppies could talk, I'm pretty sure they would be saying, "Again...Again...Again," every time we bring out the hose.

Who says you need a swimming pool to learn how to swim? The last couple of days, our puppies have been practicing their water skills in the backyard. Miss M realized that she could poop in the pouring rain. Mr. C realized he could still chase squirrels through the water. Mr. M decided he could still hunt sticks in the water.

I'm not sure why, but Miss B has always like peeing in water. She's been peeing in the water at the beach since the first time we took her there when she and Mr. C were little- before we even thought about getting more puppies. So for her, this was just a smaller, quieter beach to pee in. She is also starting to realize that when she stands close to us under the umbrella, she doesn't get wet.

Miss M wasn't really sure about all of the water at first. She loves playing in the water hose, but this isn't quite the same thing. Everything must smell different because her nose was going 100 mph smelling the air.

Mr. C was very interested in the water and in whether or not he could drink it.

We were amazed at how glassy the water was. The ground is so saturated from the rain we've gotten over the past few weeks, that it just sat there and didn't soak in right away. We had water flowing through the yard like a river at one point. Then it just stayed. We were really glad we didn't have to go anywhere during the worst of it. Needless to say, our rubber boots have been getting a lot of use.

So, for anyone who follows our blog but doesn't live on the coast, the only downside to being near the water is having to worry about hurricanes. I (Mom) am slightly obsessed with hurricane season. I love the excitement of tracking the storms, and even an evacuation can be quite thrilling, to be honest. But... now that we have puppies, tropical weather is super boring while it's going on because we can't take them anywhere fun (namely the beach). They have to stay indoors and do other things to get their energy out. 
Right now, T.S. Bill is doing its thing down in Matagorda, and we are getting rain bands from it. We haven't had much in the way of wind, but we have had enough rain that our yard is once again a lake. We have been letting the puppies take turns so that we can play fetch or tugging games with them one on one. That way they use more energy than they would if they were all out, but it is still a little boring being cooped up in the house.
When we first started watching the tropical disturbance in the Gulf, before it became a storm, we decided to go ahead and run to the store to fill a water bottle and just see what the mood was like. Wal-Mart was a madhouse. It was late Monday morning, but the water shelves were already empty. We saw people scrambling to get chips and snack foods and stock up on batteries. We even saw an accident that had just happened when we were on the way home. It was crazy out there! Okay, maybe that was a little dramatic, but people were a little frantic.
We had our little point and shot digital camera with us, so we decided to take some super exciting pictures at Wal-Mart of the empty shelves. I tried to see if we could find anyone to take a picture of for the people of Wal-Mart page, but it seems that most people were more dignified than usual. Maybe the kinds of people that end up on that page don't bother preparing for tropical storms?
Here are the super exciting Wal-Mart pictures. My guess is that these shelves were completely empty later in the day, but we didn't really want to go out later on.

Mr. M wanted to track the tropical storm on the hurricane tracking chart, but Mr. C pointed out that it was so close to the coast before becoming a tropical storm, it wouldn't be much fun to track. So we gave up on that.

We don't have any cool pictures yet from during the puppies' first tropical storm, so here are a few pictures from when they were little.

Now, if you will excuse me, I have some puppies to hug.

Our puppies are growing up. Last week, Miss S went into heat for the first time. Having a dog in heat is complicated enough as it is. There's the matter of keeping everything clean and then the matter of not letting her out and about where there might be unaltered males around. It gets even more complicated when you have an unaltered male in the same house who also happens to be her brother. 
We don't want to mate Miss S or Miss M right away. I read in several articles that you should wait at least until the third heat to breed them because they are not completely mature yet. We don't plan on breeding them very often, and we don't want to do anything that will compromise their health or growth. On top of that, we absolutely DO NOT want Miss S mating with Mr. M.
So...we have been keeping a very close eye on the two of them. Last week, Miss M was bleeding, and Mr. M was interested in smelling and licking her, but he wasn't trying to mate at all. We would let them play a little together but didn't let them out of our sight, kept them separated part of the time and started having her sleep in a crate at night. Starting Thursday of this week, Mr. M seemed a lot more interested, and Miss S started acting a little more interested in him. From that moment on, we started keeping them separated- no more playing together for the next couple of weeks. We started setting a timer so that they would each have equal amounts of time in and out of the crates.
When she first started bleeding, we went to Petsmart and got some of the disposable diapers. They didn't fit very well and were hard to get on. We went through the package in about 4 days. At $19 per package and given that heat can last 21 days or even slightly longer, we decided it would be cheaper to just go ahead and get the reusable one. It is so much better! It fits better, is easier to put on and can be used with regular feminine pads (which are way cheaper than the ones they sell at the pet store).

Miss S has been handling it pretty well. She's been a little more lethargic than normal and slightly more irritable at times. She has always been protective and can't always tell the difference between when the other puppies are playing and when they are fighting. As soon as the others look like they are getting rough, she steps in and growls at them until they stop. That has gotten a little stronger since being in heat. If she is in her crate and the others are playing or trying to take each other's toys, she growls at them from her crate to get them to stop. We don't want her to feel like it's okay to be aggressive, so any time she starts getting pushy, we immediately put her in time out. 
Overall though, she hasn't really been much more aggressive than normal. She's even been snuggling with the cats. As I write this, she and Kitty S and Miss B are snuggling together on the bed- something I wasn't sure we would ever see!
Earlier, Miss B and Kitty P were snuggling on the kitchen floor when Miss S joined in and tried to snuggle too.

Mr. M is getting used to the new system of taking turns being out. We had gotten him a male diaper to wear to buy us a little bit of time in keeping them from mating, but he doesn't have to wear it when they are not out at the same time. This evening though, he kept looking at it on the arm of the couch and tried to jump up and get it. So we put it on, even though Miss S was in her crate, and he totally calmed back down and went about playing again. They are so funny sometimes. 
Miss M has decided that we need to play with the water hose every time we go outside, and Mr. C is just enjoying getting to play by himself with Mr. M when Miss S is in her crate. The two boys actually play really good together when the girls aren't trying to break them up or take their toys.

Today, we took little Miss M to the vet to get her weighed for her heart worm prevention. She is officially 52 pounds now! I don't know why, but she just seems so small. I guess the others are just so big that they make her look small. At the vet's, she said hi to everyone and even got to visit with an older puppy about her same size. She was really hoping to get to visit with the cat that was in the office, but the cat didn't feel the same way. After we dropped by the vet, we went over to Grandma and Grandpa's house. The puppies went right to work shredding water bottles and chewing on toys. 

They found plenty of old toys to shred. On a different note, I think they make little boys' toys stronger than some dog toys. When we buy them dog toys, they shred them and pull the stuffing out in no time flat. The little boy toys take a little while to fully shred.

Two of the puppies' two-legged cousins came over unexpectedly when they were out in the yard taking care of business. Mr. M knocked over the 3 year old cousin while trying to give him kisses. The boy started crying, so Mr. M stood over him kissing him some more to get him to stop crying, which of course didn't go over too well. He didn't scratch him or nip him, but his cousin was less than amused. I mean, to a 3 year old, Mr. M is huge. Plus, he probably weighs 3 times more than the 3 year old. 
Afterward, as the boys were leaving, one of their aunts was going in. He told her not to go in because there was a really big dog and it was dangerous. He was very concerned for her safety. On a better note, the puppies didn't jump on their aunt when she came in. That's an improvement. 
They were super excited to be able to run around the yard, smelling the rabbit's cage. They were even more excited when Mom got out the water hose, initially with hopes of cleaning the poop scooper. We quickly realized that cleaning anything with the water hose would be an exercise in futility as long as the puppies were outside. So we played with the hose instead.  It made getting their attention off of the rabbit a lot easier. It also really cooled them off. You just can't beat playing in the water in the summer heat.

So, even though we are on our 5th puppy now, we are still learning new things all of the time. Here are a few of the things we have learned recently.

1.) If you are going to let your puppy sleep on the bed, always have a back-up set of clean sheets just in case. Puppies are like lightening. They can go from a muddy yard, straight past the foot wiping area into the house and up onto the bed in the blink of an eye if you leave the doors open in between.  Also, upset tummies  usually come on unexpectedly, and having a puppy throw up or worse on your bed in the middle of the night is not cool. Having that happen with no clean sheets to put on would be far worse. Now that I think about it, I think I need to go check my closet and make sure my sheets are clean.

2.) When you are traveling with your puppies, always make sure you have something for them to chew on. Otherwise, the inside of your car is in grave danger. Puppy teeth are sharp and leather, wood and plastic are irresistible. Unfortunately, most of the inside of your car is made up of these materials. Apparently, plastic cup holders, seat belt buckles and door handles are particularly tempting.

3.) Squeaky toys are good. Really good. Whatever preconceived ideas you have about how annoying squeaky toys are... forget about them. If you hear your puppy squeaking a toy in the next room, you know without a doubt that she is not chewing on something she shouldn't be chewing on. Plus, you know where they are. We love the ones that are long and skinny with plenty of squeakers. That way several puppies can play at once.

4.) Avoid toys with lots of stuffing. Our puppies usually don't pull larger teddy bears apart. Several of them sleep with teddy bears in their crates and use them as pillows, but in general, stuffing is a bad idea. Maybe it's just because we have pit bulls, but stuffing is a waste of time. If it is a toy they don't play with all of the time, sometimes they will leave it in tact. The toys without stuffing though, are so much easier because they can chew and chew them without stuffing ending up all over the living room floor.

5.) When it looks like your puppies don't have any toys left, you have a tendency to rush over to Petsmart and buy new ones. Before you do that, clean out from underneath your couch. Over time, toys seem to just disappear. Just the other day, I was wondering what had happened to the red and green teddy bears that were filled with rope instead of stuffing. I thought they had just gone the way of the dodo. Then we decided to move the couch to sweep. I found two missing slippers, a pair of canvas shoes that I thought had been accidentally thrown away, and tons of toys. Some of them were mangled, but a lot of them were still in good shape- just a little dusty. There were toys I didn't even remember I had gotten. The red and green rope teddy bears were there, along with two others in tan and brown that I had completely forgotten about. It was amazing. Our puppies were super excited. New toys everywhere.