Now that we’ve chosen the not-so-little boy who’ll be swelling our pack to somewhere between 4 and 4.3 Beagles in a couple of weeks, we’re naturally wondering how he’ll compare to Poppy. Will he enjoy cuddles as much as she does? Will he cuddle up with her in a way that Beanie and Biggles have still to this day never done together (except by accident, immediately after which they parted much as in the “Those aren’t pillows” scene from Plains Trains and Automobiles)? And will he have a curious fear of puddles like Poppy?

One thing we do know for sure is that Monkey – as we’ve called him – likes to grip the humie who’s holding him; this should mean that he has no need for The Poppy Manoeuver. What’s that you may ask? Well it’s sort of the reverse of The Picard Manoeuver in Star Trek Next Generation. If you’re a Trek nerd like me, you may remember that the Star Trek costumes tended to ride up during scenes; to remedy this the actors – Patrick Stewart in particular – would tug them back down at the waist on a regular basis. By contrast, when Poppy’s sitting on a humie lap she tends to slide down towards the floor. She does nothing to stop this, so once every minute or so you have to put your hand under her bum and hoist her back up. BTW if you’re wondering whether she’d eventually save herself if we didn’t intervene, the answer is “no”. As an experiment one afternoon I did let gravity do it’s thing and she ended up deposited in a heap on the rug between my feet, looking a little surprised but otherwise unperturbed.

As I mentioned in my previous post a bond has developed between Beanie and Poppy. Poppy loves to follow the Beanster on her morning rounds of the garden, and likes to rub her cheek against Beanie’s whenever they’re together in the living room.  They get quite close when snoozing on the sofa and in our bed too, but they’ve still not curled up together in the classic Beagle fashion.

I think Poppy’s starting to win over The Bigglet. He’ll still give her an Elvis-lip snarl if she strays close to him when he has a precious resource such as a sock, but when they’re out on a walk they do seem to enjoy each other’s company. Just recently I’ve been doing short sprints with all three of them together on extending leads, and Poppy and Biggles have taken to running alongside each other with big grins on their faces.

Poppy has now learned most of the little rituals we have with Beanie & Biggles. She knows that after a fun play session everybody runs to the kitchen baby-gate to get treats; she knows about “half-way biccie” on walks, and about “final wees” and “crates” at bedtime, and that the “if one puppy…” rule dictates that when one beaglet gets treats, all beaglets get treats. Come to think of it that rule is getting burdensome with three Beagles and it’s going to be even worse with four, but it is one of the key rules in The Book of Beagle Law so we’re stuck with it.

Time is against me now so I’ll quickly end the post with a few more pics..

Three Beagles on the beach. They’re getting so much easier to handle together now…

When Poppy has a photo session on a new bed, we all do.

Even if one us is a bit too Biggly to fit in it.

When it’s Poppy play time, all the toys must be taken out of the toy box.

All of them!

No really, ALL of them.

Including some things that aren’t meant to be toys.

Squeaky squirrels are for shaking!

Pink dinosaurs merit a more cautious approach

But when it comes to tug, Beanie is still the master!

We went to Poppy’s breeder yesterday for a second viewing of the new litter of pups who are now around 6 weeks old.

In Poppy’s case we only got to select from the available pups right on the day of collection, but this time around we had a free pick of the five little boys – something we hadn’t been expecting. There wasn’t much to separate them in terms of markings but two them had apparently been making extra visits to the food cupboard, and it has to be said that of those two, one was a bit of a biffer. In fact we was so much bigger than his siblings that he could cause a roadblock just by standing in the doorway of the puppy residence.

In recent weeks Poppy has kind of become Beanie’s understudy, so we wanted our new little boy to be a good match for Biggles. As we started to describe The Bigglet’s main traits to the breeder, phrases like “differently intelligent”, “a bit slow” and “not the leader type” somehow entered the conversation. As it turned out, those same phrases seemed to be a fit for the more generously proportioned boy. Apparently he wasn’t just bigger than his siblings, he was also Bigglier.

The breeder picked up a pup for Susan to hold, and handed me the candidate mini-Bigglet. I held him with one hand under his bum and one hand across his chest under his front paws. As he sank into my hands he curled those paws round my thumb and forefinger to grip them firmly. In my head it was like he was saying “choose me.” After another round of discussion, that’s exactly what we did. So here’s the not-so-little fellow who’ll be joining us in a couple of weeks, and we’re going to call him Monkey:

If you stick a potato into the ground and leave it long enough, you’ll get more potatoes from it. I know this for a fact, because I’ve seen it happen in our garden. Beagles however are substantially different from potatoes, so Poppy doing this:

should not normally result in this:

That however is exactly what’s happened. Poppy did a face plant in a tub, there was a new litter of pups, and now she’s got a little brother coming. We will – hopefully for some considerable time – soon be a four Beagle family!

Getting yet another Beagle may be the craziest thing we’ve ever done. Poppy has only recently discovered that pees and poos can be deposited in places outside of the kitchen. She’s still getting used to humping her squeaky duck, still learning how to woof from our resident masters of noise pollution, and still nibbling anything that’s nibblable along with some things that aren’t.

Perhaps the fact that Poppy has propagated a brother from her face planting indicates that she’s not a real Beagle, but actually an alien impersonating a Beagle. Come to think of it I do keep joking that’s she’s a Nibblosian from the planet Nibble. Maybe I’m right.

Nevertheless in just a few weeks we’ll have another little bundle of chaos. Are Beanie & Biggles prepared to deal with another new arrival? Are we?

Actually I think it could go surprisingly smoothly. Beanie & Biggles are already used to the changes in routine that coincided with Poppy; the new pup shouldn’t introduce any further changes for them. Poppy will gain a little playmate and they’ll be able to burn off some of their excess energy together. We’ll be run off our feet coping with the demands of an extra pup, but at least the little guy should be faster to house-train given that he’ll have a similarly aged peer to learn from.

Whether it goes smoothly or not, I’d much rather have my head filled with the kind of crazy that comes from having four Beagles than with the kind of crazy that’s sweeping the globe right now.