Growth stunt

For those of you who need to know where Rosie is every minute of every day (that would be me, anyway), she is outside right now, playing tug-of-war with Riley with their "flying squirrel" cloth frisbee.  They are both kind of lackadaisical about chasing the frisbee, and even less reliable about bringing it back, but oh they love tugging on it.

Rosie's growth has stalled out this week, and I think that's a good thing. When we got her, on March 22, she weighed, as I recall, six pounds.

Rosie doing her best to grow. This is on Day Three of living with us, March 25.

Over the next four weeks, she grew and grew and grew. First she got tubby. Then her torso lengthened out, all at once, so that she looked like a wiener dog. Then her legs--Whoop! Whoop! Whoop! Whoop!--suddenly elongated, practically overnight. She got tall. She packed on the weight--one week she gained three pounds. Holy moly, we said. She's going to be huge! She started losing that puppy shape and started looking more like a dog. (Her head, on the other hand, has not grown at all.)

Rosie at 16 pounds.

All of this sort of coincided with her wolverine fits, and I think the two are related: Her body was under so much stress, changing so fast--plus she was teething--that it made her a little frantic and nuts.

And now she has stopped growing, for a while. For the last ten days, she has weighed a steady 16 pounds. I figure her body is resting up, gathering energy for the next big growth spurt. She is calmer, sweeter. Her wolverine moods have stopped. She does not bite us, at all.

This morning I sat down on the floor, my back against the wall, and she picked up an unauthorized sock and crawled into my lap and curled up. I stroked her head, her back, her bony little rump. I sang nonsensical puppy songs to her. She mouthed the sock (which I am now wearing; she did not puncture it).

I'm not worried about this pause in growth. She has a lot of energy, and she runs and plays and eats very well. She is so food-oriented during training that I occasionally wonder if two cups of kibble a day, plus a kibble-packed peanut-butter Kong, plus tons of training treats, is enough food. But I think it is.  She is not skinny. Dr. J. told us that if she started "looking ribby" then we should increase her food. She is not ribby.

I know she will start growing again. I know that a puppy at age 12 weeks is nowhere near full-grown. But I kind of like the idea of her being smaller than our other dogs. Toby, Boscoe and Riley were all in the 45-52 pound range. Boscoe was a cuddler, but he was far too big to be a lap dog.

We're waiting still for the results of the DNA test we sent in on both dogs. Maybe Rosie has a little chihuahua in her! Maybe she'll be crawling into my lap for years to come!