I should know better

A busy week - another family to see to.

Fenella presented me in her usual leisurely way with two little girls one afternoon last week. Then she settled down to the joys of motherhood.

I wasn`t so convinced. I was sure I could feel something else in there....something moving. Poor Fenella submitted to being poked and prodded, but did nothing at all. Well, she has a history of slow whelping, so I waited. Nothing. At last I organised a lift to the vet - ours doesn`t do house calls - and poor Fenella, with her daughters beside her on a hot water bottle was taken down the winding road to the vet hospital.

More prodding and poking. Definitely something there. Oxytocin, and many jokes about how difficult it was to whelp something so small - neither Fenella nor I seeing it that way. Then suddenly, much to her surprise, Fenella was a mother again, and in a few minutes more another arrived, breech and with the cord round her neck. A bit of hasty revival, and Fenella was the astonished mother of four very loud girls. A scan to be sure that there wasn`t a fifth, then back up the long windng dark road with four shoving for position on the hot water bottle.

And they haven`t looked back since. Fenella is eating for Scotland, and quite happy to be knee-deep in a squirming mass of puppies. And I have called a halt - that`s it for this year. Six little Papillon girls is quite enough - especially when four of them can make that much noise.