Will The Real Moo Moo Please Stand Up

My facebook friends are commenting to me that my beloved Moo Moo does not look like a real puppy. Even people who see her in real life tell me she looks like a stuffed animal. If only they could see what I see.

Oh yea, they can...

Will the REAL Moo Moo please stand up.

Please excuse the towel, they are always dumping over the water dish and I have decided to save a few hundred trees and just keep a towel in easy reach at all times. :)

Now I am going to tell you about my paranoia as a 1st time EB breeder mommy. Friday I moved all the babies from the master bathroom to the kitchen. They walked fine in the whelping pool, but in the kitchen their little rear feet were sliding all over the place. I emailed my mentor and she told me to put carpet down. My babies were still not walking well even on the carpet. I searched the net and was getting worried my puppies were going to be stuck walking on only their front legs for the rest of their lives.  I was like the mother who's taking their 1st born baby to the doctor at 9 months because the book says they should be walking but they aren't. I was searching the internet about crippled 3 week EB puppies who couldn't walk and  I found an article about this shoot used for swimmer puppies here.  My puppies aren't swimmers, but I thought for sure they were going to become swimmers if I couldn't get them up and walking. So right away I made my husband run out and make me one of these shoots.

Here is how a shoot like this works. The puppy walks down a very narrow "hallway" that is only as wide as the pup itself. This keeps the legs from sliding out to the sides and forces them to walk with their legs underneath them. For the type of shoot I wanted it would have to be very long because once the puppy reaches the end of the shoot you have to turn them around and put them back in it again.

So my husband comes in with the shoot he has made. It is 4 foot long and 6 inches high. No joke. The puppies take 5 or 6 steps and has to be turned around again, that's if they aren't just climbing out over the edge that is barley shoulder high. (oh yea, you can see the shoot in the video. It's the wood thing behind Moo Moo. That gives you an idea of how big it is and she is my smallest puppy!)

I send my poor husband back out to Menards for new wood, then I have a brain storm. I run and get one of the rubber bath mats that we had in the bottom of the whelping pool, guess what, my puppy can stand!! Then I remember that the back side of my $190 foflor from Bungalow, that I use for all my favorite photo shoots, is rubber backed & machine washable. I get my rug and put it rubber side up on the kitchen floor, right over the top of the carpet, and all my puppies are tottering around when my husband gets back home with the new wood that I no longer need.

To top it all off I had sent an email in a panic to another EB friend, I swear I could hear her laughing through the return email I got later that night. She said "all 3 week old EB puppies walk like that, they will be chasing you around the house by this time next week." If she could have just emailed before my panic attack. :)

So here we are just 3 days later and as you can see everyone is getting around as good as any new baby learning to walk. My husband stubbed his toe on the shoot we have never used except to let the puppies chase each other around it, so it's now out in the scrap pile in the shed.

All you long time EB breeders please feel free to laugh at my expense, but if you have any other tips for this 1st time mommy please feel free to leave them below.