Hello all,

Very new to breeding so I beg your patience. I have a 10-day old litter of one of a small breed and he has been quite vocal since about day 5.

He has been gaining weight like crazy and seems to be feeding just fine but starting the night of his fifth day he started whining and crawling around the box and even up the side. When mama dog started whining as well, I was afraid something was wrong. My best guess was colic since I only ever see mama relieving the urine. I tried stimulating him myself but didn’t get anywhere so I took them into the vet and they cleaned him out with an enema and took an X-ray just to check on things and confirmed that he was a bit gassy.
They sent me home with instructions to stimulate him around 4 times a day.  I have yet to successfully be able to get him to go without the use of a warm water enema with a syringe. On advice of some friends, I picked up some simethicone and that seems to have helped a little, however after last night (the quietest night we’ve had so far) he has been more vocal and restless than ever! He is still gaining weight, though at a shallower rate than before, and mama dog seems less concerned/ stressed about him, but since he is a singleton puppy and my first litter, it is hard to know if there is cause for concern since I have no behavior to compare it to. As it is summer, my apartment is always around 77-80 deg. F. So I can’t imagine he’d be cold. I had mama’s teets checked when we were at the vet and she is producing milk just fine but he still whines when he is at the teet too sometimes.

Would another vet visit be called for at this point? I dont like exposing him to the germs in a vets office more than I have too but I also don’t want to ignore him whining if thee really is something wrong.

Any suggestions on how to stimulate him properly? Right now I am using warm water and cotton balls and rubbing the area but as I said, I have yet to get this to work without squirting some water up first.
Is it dangerous to give a puppy too many enemas? He certainly doesn’t seem to enjoy them and I don’t want to hurt the poor little guy.
Is simethicone safe and how often can/should it be administered?

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated!!

Have you checked to see if he is hot?  Keeping puppies too hot can lead to them being restless and upset and the weather has hotted up for sure.

The temperature in a whelping box will always be higher than in the room...

I wondered about that but he definitely seems to be more active at night and while it doesn’t cool down much it is at least a degree or two cooler than the day time, he does favor the edges of the box though so he might be trying to cool down. I’ve been so afraid of him chilling that I’ve been easing off on the ac. I’ll see if cooling the box a bit helps.

That still doesn’t account for his lack of pooping though, does it?

Crawling to the side of the box could be because it's too hot in there.   However, having no bowel movement will make him very uncomfortable.   We had a litter where 'madam' would happily pee them, but anything more was quite beneath her.   So I had to spend hours with a warm cloth sitting in the box trying to get them to empty.   I even sat them in a bowl of warm water, in the hope of getting things moving.  If they did go, it had more to do with gravity, than much else and the poor dears spent most of their early days moaning and groaning.    Eventually they managed to do it themselves (or gravity).   It was her first, and last litter although the puppies were good enough for us to keep two, one being the mother of our Canadian-bred UK Champion.   So it wasn't all bad.