Exhaustion setting in...

My husband and I are sharing the puppy watching duties through the night. Typically, I go to bed early and he stays up until 1am and then I get up and stay up the rest of the night so he can sleep. This is why God made puppies so cute. If they were chickens or snakes for example, I would be fast asleep by now!

It is hard to remove human baby emotion from your psyche. I hear the puppies cry and my first instinct is to want to pick them up and rock them. My heart is thinking, "oh those poor babies want to be cuddled and be made to feel secure" but my head knows the cry has more to do with basic needs - cold or hot, hungry, gas bubble. I can see that stepping back a bit and letting Tioga figure it out is benefiting us both. She was really looking to me to "fix it" when a puppy made a distress call. She would just whine and I would feel badly for them both and go cuddle the puppy, hold it to her for licking or for nursing etc. Last night, mostly out of sheer exhaustion, I gave it a few extra minutes before stepping in. As I had hope, Tioga figured it out on her own and was able to quiet her puppy by nudging them to her for a cuddle or some milk.

I feel like I am repeating that line from the movie Cast Away every morning. "Tomorrow the sun will rise, who knows what the tide will bring in" Because right around 4 am I am saying, "Why the heck did I think breeding Tioga was a good idea?"