Dawn's babies stabilized

We have mostly good news. 3 of Dawns kits are still alive! We haven't mixed them in with Twilight's kits because the size difference is too great, but that three are still alive is great news. The Lady of the House wanted to try putting a 1 gallon flat water bottle of hot water under the nest every 8 hours, and I think that extra energy they don't have to use to stay warm is keeping them going. They are growing slowly, but they are finally growing again. The photo above just has one of Dawn's kits with Twilight's monsters to show size difference.

Today's weight checks really illustrated the differences between Dawn and Twilight's litters at this point. Dawn's kits have a largest kit of 78 grams and a smallest of 70 grams, way small for how old they are at this point, probably due to the energy used to survive the hypothermia. Twilight's largest kit on the other hand was 233 grams this morning, with the smallest kit at 137 grams. The average weight of the litter is 186.33 grams Just for comparison, at 10 days old Dawn's litters when healthy have had the biggest kit at around 137 grams and the average at 118 grams.

By this point you've probably noticed the blurry photos Left of Twilight. I had the Lady of the House get photos of her while I was putting her kits back in the nest. You'll notice that all of them are blurry because there was a lot of movement going on the whole time. Top Left in the first photo we just managed to close the main door to keep her from coming around the open side since there is a stone tile keeping her from getting at me. Left the second photo shows her engaging the tile.

 Left in the third photo she's started to move the tile already and is trying to get at me. Mind you, she is much less aggressive about this today than she was even yesterday. Today she was just grunting rather than making this strange growling sound that sounds somewhat like a growling sound from a big cat.

 Once she's tipped the marble tile a bit in one direction by hitting it she comes around to the other side, and as you can see Right pushes it over and Below Right I'd better be done by this point. because she will come after me. Maybe not the most useful pictures in the world, but I wanted to share what my morning wake up has been like for the past 10 days when it's been warm enough to do weight checks.

I have to say doing the weight checks is interesting, and has helped us do decision making with Dawn's struggling kits. We made the decision last night that if they were still having trouble gaining weight today now that they're getting supplemental warmth, that no matter how much smaller they are we were going to have to mix them with Twilight's kits. With such a huge weight difference survival would be unlikely as the larger kits would push the smaller ones out of the way. But if Dawn's babies hadn't started gaining weight again by today they wouldn't have had any chance as is. Now that they are gaining weight we don't have to, and the Lady of the House and me are much happier about it. It's been a high stress few days since Sunday, and we hope that as the snow finally starts to melt off that things will calm down a bit, and we will have more good news coming from the homestead. I hope everyone enjoyed the short horror movie photo show of Twilight, and that she calms down enough that it doesn't have to be a thing in the near future!

Weight Charts
I finally have the weight charts up and available for folks to see.

Dawn's weight chart is a bit depressing but informative. It shows the normal growth up until the freezing water deluge followed by the stagnation.
Dawn's litter weight chart

Twilight's is just impressive especially when compared to the older charts.
Twilight's litter weight chart