I can’t believe that Lizzie’s due date is tomorrow.

We received the equipment from WhelpWise last week and began monitoring Lizzie once daily until Saturday, when we started monitoring her contractions twice daily.  Things seemed to be moving along a steady clip with 3 contractions per hour on Saturday during both sessions and then 4 contractions during the last Sunday session.

My wonderful husband woke up around 5am for a monitoring session before we need to leave for work – and there was a single contraction.  In the last three sessions we’ve progressed back up to 2 contractions per hour session.  Labor is defined as 5 contractions per hour, with actual puppies arriving within 8 to 12 hours.

Included as part of the WhelpWise service, is a fetal heart doppler, so we can be sure the puppies aren’t in any distress.  We’ve been having great fun finding the puppies and making sure we have an accurate count.  We’ve determined there are two on her left side and three on her right.   A few of the pups now have names based on their location:  Lumpy who’s easy to find because he’s right by a small sebaceous cyst, Ribby who hangs out right by Lizzie’s rib cage and Chicken Wing who hangs out right by the fold of skin where Lizzie’s leg attaches to her body.  They aren’t very elegant names, but they do help when we’re trying to track everybody and verify a good heart rate.

We’ll be doing another monitoring session tonight to see if we need to stay home from work tomorrow.

Here’s a great link with pictures of a Mastiff Whelping to tide you over until we have our own pictures to share.