Surprise Puppies!

I thought she might want to give birth on our front deck. My hunch was off by only two feet.

By my best calculations, she was due Thursday or Friday; Wednesday at the earliest. It was Monday evening. We’d had a big windstorm and now it was raining. Freja had been fine and acting normal all day. I figured we could go up the road two miles for my sister in law’s birthday, but be careful to only be gone a couple of hours. Freja was under the deck. Because of the rain, I presumed. She’d been completely normal all day. I had the fleeting thought that we’d better work harder to convince her to “nest” in the pet shed tomorrow, and possibly even lock her in there so she wouldn’t go and instinctively dig a hole somewhere else to have her pups. When we drove in the yard at home, she didn’t come to meet the car and wait for us to get out as usual. We needed to find her before she got any of her own ideas about where to prepare to have puppies. We opened the car door and instantly knew it was too late. My dreams of a peaceful whelping in the puppy pool on clean hay in the pet shed – complete with Christmas lights strung around for the perfect birthing ambiance – dashed to pieces at the little squeaks and cries we heard.

She was UNDER the deck: directly below her favorite doorstep spot where she always sleeps. Wild images of a covered in mud me, slithering under to either retrieve her and the puppies or lay with her to make sure we didn’t lose a pup, flashed through my mind. The gears were turning and I was thinking hard for the best plan of action. “I’ll get the drill and start taking off deck boards,” Ben stated matter-of-factly. Oh. What a logical solution!

The epic rescue began, with us talking softly to Freja the whole time to reassure her as Ben unscrewed and lifted the long boards out of place. To our surprise, she’d already given birth to not one, or two, or even three, but FIVE puppies. In just 2 or 3 hours! Was it the crazy storm? Or that it was finally quiet and calm once our family had left? She’d dug and prepared a little area… in the dirt. Since puppies come out wet, they were caked in mud.

It seemed too much to move her while in labor to the backyard pet shed, so with a quick change in plans, we hauled the kiddie pool right up on the deck and got her up and settled. Ben got the heat lamp rigged up in case of any evening chill, and Freja and I worked together to wash off her muddy puppies until we could see the beautiful variety of shades – cream, golden and copper!

In the hazy mist of a peaceful night fog that hid the moon, an amazing momma dog gave birth to six more puppies. Six boys and five girls, all healthy and strong!

And that is the story of how our dog (despite our best efforts) chose her own location to birth her babies. Right outside the front door, where she always stays.