we had a breakthrough! actually, we had two.

this afternoon was breakthrough day - i came home from work, went to change clothes (b/c attempting to do anything but bottle feeding leaves me covered from head to toe in puppy kisses and formula), then i'm coming out of the bedroom to go to the guest bedroom and who comes to greet me from the direction of the living room..yep, it was bear..he is now big enough to climb the kennel door partition that i was using to close the hole between where the edge of their kennel was and the rest of the entrance to their pen. so his breakthrough was quite literal.

so then i made their bottles and took two bowls of formula (i've been trying to get them to drink out of the bowls but they usually do so for about 30 seconds and then get fussy and demand me and to have their bottles - unfortunately for bear, he's not really able to suck any more and can't get the formula from the bottle so he was on mandatory bottle weaning (which really meant that he only ate about half of his breakfast this morning). so then breakthrough number two --- i didn't use their bottles once!!! they crowded around the two bowls and were lapping away and i just kept topping them off with the bottles. whew. so at least they can now drink out of a bowl. let's hope it happens for the next feeding too!

i posted pictures of them playing after this last feeding. too bad i didn't take the camera out in the backyard when we went "potty" b/c dakota switched into cleaning mode and cleaned all of their faces and chins for them (i think it was actually b/c she's developed a liking for the formula, but it looked like she was playing "mommmy")