We decided to help Luna along with a technique called “feathering” and when that still didn’t produce a puppy, we called her outside to see if walking and maybe using the bathroom would help. Well our midwifery worked! (Or, more likely, her body just finally decided it was time for birth.) Just a few minutes after we’d brought her outside, she started bearing down and we finally saw the start of our first puppy!

We darted back inside to grab the whelping box and by the time we made it back out, there was a little puppy on the dew covered grass, born at 4 in the morning. A little Blenheim lump we called Butters!

Now that the birth was going, it was ready to go smoothly! We brought Luna and Butters back into the warmth of the house and settled down to rest before the next pup. But it wasn’t even five minutes before Luna got that look again! We massaged her ears and whispered what a good girl she is and out slid another Blenheim boy: Twizzler!

Two pups out in the space of ten minutes! We love to see a birth go so smoothly! We let Butters and Twizzler nurse in the dark with their mama, but in just thirty minutes Luna started shifting around like she was getting ready to pop out the next puppy. So we took poor Butters and Twizzler to their separate puppy box so she could concentrate on her next baby. But she was in no mood to be separated from her two first babies! She crawled right into the too-small puppy box with them!

Well, that wasn’t going to work, the puppy box was much too small for puppies AND the mama, so we moved the puppies back to the whelping box and with her babies tucked back against her Luna popped out a third Blenheim boy- tinier than the rest but already gunning for those nippies! Before his placenta was even out and his umbilical cord was even cut, little Tic Tac had ahold of a nippie and a belly full of milk.

Twizzler was the blenheim puppy with the wide white forehead- a forehead that promised to make that beautiful hourglass face marking when he grew up. The first few weeks were spent in the warm and cozy whelping box with the wonderful Mama Luna. She snuggled with all her babies to keep them warm, bathed them all the time so they’d be nice and clean, and gave them delicious milkies to drink all the time. Meanwhile, us humans pampered Luna as much as we could. We fed her special treats- her favorite of which was a little recipe called “Mother’s Milk” that had all the nutrients and calories she needed to make good fat babies. We massaged her and praised her for being such a good mama and we brought the little whelping box into the living room so she could still be with the family while taking care of her babies.

Twizzler’s Daddy, Finnegan, loved to look at the babies. But Luna said not to touch them until they were big enough to play! So Finn just had to settle for watching them from afar.

After a few weeks, Twizzler’s eyes finally opened! This his ears! And then he learned how to move his little legs and soon he was walking and running and roughing and tumbling all around the whelping box. The whole litter was moved to the Puppy Play Pen where they could stretch their legs, and once they really got the hang of this whole “walking” thing, we brought them outside to the Garden where they could get their first taste of the big world around them.

Well, when he was all growed up he got to go to his forever home- with a new mama who would love him more than anything! Now he spends his days being the Snuggle King of the house, and he goes by the name Tucker. But he’ll always be The Twizz to us!

You can follow Tucker The Twizz on Instagram: @tucker.the.cavie

Swipe through the gallery to see what Tucker’s life is like now!