Oh what a night....

Wow....it has been one strange night. Ben and I ran errands all afternoon yesterday and ended up not getting back home until around 9:30 at night.

Fortunately, we had decided to make a trip to Walmart before coming home and we picked up a plastic bin for Ellie to have her puppies in, along with a baby thermometer and a suction thing. We thought we had at least another week, if not two before the little pups made their debut, but we wanted to go ahead and have the stuff ready, and boy are we glad we did!!

When we got home, I took Ellie's temperature and it was 98 degrees. At first I thought maybe I had done it wrong, so I did it again about an hour later. It had dropped a little, and I knew immediately that it was time. Normal temperature for dogs is around 101 degrees. Earlier this week when I had taken Ellie to the vet, hers was 101.7, and they told me to take her temperature everyday and when it drops she would have her puppies within 24 hours. So, since it was 98 degrees, I knew it was coming. She also kept crawling underneath our bed and scratching on the floor. She was acting so strange.

We ended up going to bed and Ellie stayed down in the plastic bin that we had bought her. At about 1:30 AM she woke me up.. and I stayed up with her until 5:30. I couldn't believe she had been pushing for that long and hadn't had a puppy. At that point, a black blob (sorry if thats kind of gross!) started coming out but Ellie quit pushing. I of course freaked out, woke Ben up, and called the emergency vet. They told me that since she had been in labor so long without having a puppy yet, she was obviously having complications and we needed to bring her in. So, we jumped up, threw on a hat, and took off. We had no idea what we were in for....

To be continued...