This post is continued from yesterday’s post where I discuss our surprise pregnant foster dog and how we agreed to take on her and her puppies despite never even having fostered a puppy at all.

The photo of the dog in question, Fishbone.

Our home is not particularly large. It does not have a finished basement. We have 4 bedrooms but each bedroom is quite small. The master bedroom is a little larger, but the largest of the other 3 is less than 8′ by 12′. One of the smallest bedrooms has our personal dog’s kennels in it and it serves as Mr. Ink’s den with his computer and bookshelf and some storage drawers. The second smallest is Miss Butterfly’s room. Since she’s often out of the house these days we moved her into a smaller room so that I could have the largest of the 3 rooms as my craft room. And when I say craft room, I mean craft/makeup/hobby/home office room. To say the room is packed is an understatement. But, everything has it’s place and it works for me. When we have a foster dog we generally also put their kennel in the craft room, so we are accustomed to using my craft room as a foster dog room.

But, in order to have a foster dog who is having puppies, I needed more space. We needed space for a whelping box and space for mama dog to leave the box but still have free access to her puppies. In preparation I cleared out the makeup corner of my craft room, moving my vanity and a credenza into the living/dining area. I had been hoping that would be an appropriate space for the whelping box. But, when a rescue friend came over, she indicated it was too close to the AC vent. So, we moved my new comfy leather chair and put the whelping box where the chair was.

We’d also chosen this room because it had the most “expendable” flooring. Meaning, at some point, we fully intended to get rid of the white carpet, even though we weren’t planning to do it any time soon. Well, our rescue friend seriously turned her nose up at the idea of leaving the carpet, and she suggested that we purchase a roll of linoleum to place over the carpet. She felt this would seriously improve the quality of our lives as we’d save a lot of time and energy on clean up.

So, later that day Mr. Ink went out and purchased a roll. Once home, we also decided that my brand new leather chair needed to leave the room as I’d be very upset if anything happened to it. So that headed to the living room as well. Now, our living room and dining room are stuffed to the brim with extra furniture which definitely annoys me. In order to sit at my makeup desk which I do every work day morning, I have to push the chair aside. There’s really no other way about it unless we put the furniture in the basement but honestly I don’t have the energy to break my back doing that when in 3 months I’ll just have to bring it back up when I put my craft room back together.

The new set up with the linoleum does seem a better option though. What you can’t see is my sit to stand desk which I’ve put in a standing position so that we can keep items up there and dogs cannot access them. The linoleum did not reach all the way across the other side of the room, so we moved a bookcase over there and we plan to put a puppy pen system up across the far end of the room to block off the door and keep the total dog access smaller. That way the only access given is to areas with linoleum covering the carpet.

Closer to the time she has her puppies (probably a little over a week left) I’ll remove the dog bed and add a bunch of soft bedding for her to nest in and rearrange. But for now, we just want her to be comfortable hanging out in the whelping box, eating some of her meals there, and getting in and out comfortably. She’s a nervous girl so it’s taking a bit of time to get her to be comfortable with the different spaces in our home.

So, that’s where we are right now in our preparations. Now we wait, x-rays on Friday to see how many puppies we may be having, daily temperature taking begins wednesday so that we can see the drop that indicates labor may start, and in the meantime, we bond with Fishbone and keep integrating her into our home. I’ve been doing some simple training with her and she’s very smart and happy to train. she also loves doing zoomies in the yard with our dog Rose and likes to roll in the grass in the evenings. And she snuggles. She absolutely loves to snuggle. She’s a great little dog and I am so glad she’s entered our home for the next few months.