Like it was yesterday

I remember when I brought Chocolatini home. She was barely three months old, and she weathered the eleven hour flight, three hour train, and twenty minute bus ride with an amazing amount of aplomb for a three month old puppy. In fact, she managed it better than most humans I know.

She was an adorable bundle of fur, and the flight attendants “barely” counted her as a dog due to her small size- she was so tiny that they couldn’t really argue that she needed to remain in her carrying case at all times. My proof of that is this picture, which is one of my favourites.

Fastforward a year and a half, and she is two kilos of joy and a day or two shy of being a mother herself.

This is something which is both exciting and terrifying for me.

On the one hand- she’s adorable, and her capacity for the creation of further adorable with this fine gentledog here is unquestionable. Their children may break the cute barrier when they fluff up-

On the other hand, I am terrified to death! She’s my baby girl, and she’s so small and precious. I’ve never assisted in puppy labour before, and I’ve never had newborn puppies before, and this is a lot of responsibility.

This is Chocolatini-

And this blog is intended to follow her trip to motherhood-

Which is apparently starting now, she’s begun panting in earnest.

Barking Bones

Chocolatini has been at it for approximately 20 minutes, and the barking is annoying me more than her offspring, which is happily nomming and ignoring her.

Baby and the Bone

Macchiata, who is in teething mode, was given a really big bone after all of the smaller ones were destroyed (between her and Mochaccino it’s like having a furry set of knives walking around). Chocolatini doesn’t like bones, but since the BABY has it… she wants it.

The Adults interact

This time it’s Mocha’s turn to be a pain in the butt- he wants to play with Tini but she’s not really interested in, you know, “moving”.

All the babies playing

Tini deigned to play with her offspring for a change, and I had all three pouncing around the bed like mad while I was trying (really hard, I might add) to focus on getting stuff done.

Uncle Mochaccino Babysits

So Mochaccino is possibly the most patient Yorkshire to ever walk the earth- Macchiata’s been getting the night crazies and she wants to play dammit but her brother isn’t around, and so she begins trying to convince the adults that they’d like to play with her.

 

A jumper for Macchiata

Previously, I made a little dress for Macchiata from purple velvet. It wasn’t spectacularly well done, however, it met the prerequisite of “cover her arse”. Last night, I decided to start working on something a little bit cleaner, and in that spirit, I went back to a few patterns I had made when Chocolatini was a puppy. She grew super fast as a little one, and by the time I had sketched the patterns out, she’d outgrown them- it’s nice to be able to reuse them, and potentially I’ll be resizing this pattern to fit Mochaccino and Chocolatini as well- it turned out really well!

Used cream velvet and pink felt, thought that this was the best combo of warm-but-still-pretty I could manage without making her entire wardrobe nothing but lilac velvet. Here I’m stitching together the front-and back panels so that everything front and everything back is easy to sew and flip.

Doubling up on the hood so that it was lined in a clean way and looked GOOD whether she ever wore it as a hood or not.
Stitched the front and back panels together leaving just enough area for the hood to go in, and to turn the jacket inside out.

Flipped, added a line of trim on the far side to cover the seam needed to keep everything in line and keep the two fabric layers in consort. Added a tack mid-back as well, since the decal will go over that.

Hood is attached, and I did a double seam to keep it well, with a single seam at the bottom to clean up presentation.

The inside of the previous picture. Thought about making the coat reversable and decided against it, as buttons are a lot more finicky than velcro is, and not nearly as forgiving!

The coat and decal! It was a 2 dollar decal I picked up on a stock sale at Migros, iron on and away I go, was super easy to apply but I wasn’t a fan of the yellow to be honest.

Pretty good for length, could maybe be a LITTLE shorter on the tummy, but considering her thin-furred status, it’s probably better this way.

This has been crossposted between my main blog and my doggy bloggy

Becoming a family

Chocolatini was a very good mummy when her puppies were born- she was attentive and the separation I needed to enforce when she was sick was painful for her, she wanted to be with her babies. As puppies do, they grew, and she became less attentive, and then, outright hostile towards them. They were in her space! Cappuccino was preferred to Macchiata- he was bigger, he could hold his own against her and would play with her. It took Macchiata much longer to reach that stage, and she’s only now really comfortable trying to make the others play with her. This morning as I was walking out the door, I found all three of them sharing a pillow, and it made me squee- Tini is more accepting of Macchiata, and Mocha’s taking care of them both. Aww !

Happy 4 months!

Happy Four Months, Macchiata! My little girl is officially four months old today, and she’s grown so much stronger. She eats on her own now, both wet food and dry, and will, given the opportunity, steal food from her mum and Zio as well.

She’s no more fond of the brush than Chocolatini is, but she will let me pull her hair up out of her eyes (unlike mum) and it results in the cutest little whale spout up top. She’s a total lap-dog, and in this picture, she crawled up on his feet herself… and then proceeded to climb the rest of the way up his legs until she was plopped down securely in his lap. Insert awws here. 🙂

Cappuccino’s New Home

Cappuccino’s new family has sent me a few pictures of his first days with them, beginning with the car ride-Before moving to his exploration of the garden. For such a small puppy, to have a garden of that size all for him is palatial !

 

And then there were three~

Today, Cappuccino went to his forever-home. He’s been gone maybe 10 minutes and already my house feels very, very empty. Macchiata is snoozing, I do not think she realises her big brother is gone, yet. Mochaccino and Chocolatini aren’t home, either, so I don’t know how they’ll handle coming home to find him missing.
He went with a very nice older couple. From the minute I opened the door, he had his nose out there and was wuffling the woman, trying to see her, and see what she was about. It was very hard to let go. My little boy. I had brushed him and gotten him ready to see his prospective new-parents, but I did imagine that it would be very much like the other times. They would come, they would see him, and they would decide they didn’t like him, or that the price was too high. They argued the price, I stood by it. And they acquiesced. Cappuccino was purchased as a 50th birthday present for his new mummy. She promised they had a nice, large garden and that they were “stay at home” retirees, that he’d never be alone. She also promised, seeing how hard it was for me to let go, that we could have playdates for the puppies.
I signed the receipt, and they took little Cappuccino and his vaccination booklet and away they went.