By Albert & Terra Collver · June 23, 2026
A week ago the Game On litter found their feet and their voices. This week they found the food bowl — and with it, the single biggest change in a puppy’s first two months.
The puppies are four weeks old today. They are walking with real purpose, wrestling like professionals, barking at things that deserve it (and many that don’t), and — the headline — they have started eating their first solid food. Etta is still nursing them, but for the first time she is no longer the only item on the menu.
The first meals: puppy mush
This week we introduced “puppy mush” — high-quality puppy kibble soaked soft and blended with warm goat’s milk or puppy formula into a warm, soupy gruel a four-week-old can lap rather than chew. The first session is always equal parts feeding and comedy: a couple of puppies walk straight through the pan, one falls asleep in it, and somebody always ends up wearing it. Within a day or two, the lightbulb goes on, and they start associating that warm pan with something very good is happening.
We start weaning now, at four weeks, for good reasons. The puppies’ first teeth are erupting, so they’re equipped to start managing texture. Etta’s milk, while still flowing, can’t keep up forever with eight fast-growing puppies — the scale (more on that below) shows just how much they’re demanding. And a gradual, low-stress introduction to solid food over the next three to four weeks means that by the time these puppies go to their new homes, eating from a bowl is old, familiar, boring news — one less new thing to stress about in a week that will already be full of them.
To be clear: this is the beginning of weaning, not the end of nursing. Which brings us to the hardest worker in the room.
Still nursing — but on her terms now
Etta is still nursing the litter several times a day, and that’s exactly right. At four weeks the puppies are getting a shrinking share of their calories from her and a growing share from the pan, and that ratio will keep tipping over the next few weeks until they’re fully on solids around seven to eight weeks.
What’s changed is the dynamic. In the newborn weeks Etta lay down on demand around the clock. Now she nurses standing up, stepping in and out of the pen, and — wisely — starting to limit sessions as eight sets of new teeth make their presence known. This is normal, healthy maternal behavior: she’s teaching the litter that milk is a privilege on her schedule, not a 24-hour buffet. The puppy mush we provide picks up exactly the slack she’s beginning to set down. (And yes — we’re still keeping her food and water topped up generously; a nursing mother of eight burns an astonishing number of calories.)
The behavior this week: small dogs with opinions
The play that started last week has now hit full stride. The puppies are wrestling, pouncing, play-bowing, and chewing on each other with real coordination — and real opinions. We’re seeing the first hints of personality that the formal Volhard temperament test will measure in July: who barrels in first, who hangs back and watches, who’s the instigator, who’s the peacemaker. We’re taking notes on every one of them, because those notes feed directly into how we match each puppy to the right home.
A few other four-week behaviors worth flagging for the families watching:
- They’re startling and orienting to sounds now that the ears are fully online — the start of deliberate sound exposure (the vacuum, the doorbell, pots and pans, eventually low-volume recorded gunfire down the road).
- They’re starting to toddle away from the sleeping pile to eliminate, the very first glimmer of the potty instinct that makes housetraining possible later.
- And Puppy Culture’s “Week of Wow” is in full swing — novel surfaces, objects, and textures added daily now that they can walk over and investigate them on purpose.
The bodies behind the appetite: Day 28 weights
All that nursing and a week of puppy mush shows up dramatically on the scale. As of this week’s weigh-in the litter totals roughly 15.44 kilograms — about 34 pounds of English Springer Spaniel, up from about 26.5 pounds a week ago. That’s roughly 3.4 kilograms (7.5 pounds) of puppy added in a single week. The headlines:
- Every puppy in the litter is now past 4× its birth weight. A month ago these were 360-to-450-gram newborns; today the smallest is 1,650 grams.
- Four puppies have crossed 5× — Purdey, Tracker, Diver, and Wildcard. Purdey remains the size leader at 2,335 g (5 lb 2 oz), and Wildcard — born the smallest puppy in the box at 360 g — is still right at the top of the relative-growth pack at 5.31×. A lovely thing to watch in a puppy who started behind.
- There’s been some shuffling. Tracker climbed to #2 on a litter-leading week, and Diver posted the single biggest seven-day gain (+535 g). Most heartening of all: Skeet, our steady little caboose, put on +505 g and climbed off the bottom of the standings for the first time. No puppy is lagging the growth curve — the whole litter is thriving in lockstep.
(A quick honesty note for the data-minded: these are the weekly-chart weigh-in numbers; daily figures live in our puppy-tracking app and can vary by a few grams with feed timing. The shape of the story doesn’t change.)
What this means if you’re waiting on one of these puppies
For the families counting down: this is the week your puppy became genuinely self-sufficient in one important way — it can now eat. Over the next month that pan of mush will thicken into real food, the nursing will taper off, and the personality you’ll live with for the next decade-plus will come into sharper and sharper focus. The temperament notes we’re taking now are the foundation of our matching process.
One practical note for that countdown: four weeks is right about when “what will I actually need?” starts to feel real. If you’re beginning to think about getting set up, we keep a running list of the puppy supplies we use and recommend — the food, crate, toys, and gear we trust with our own dogs. No need to guess; that’s a good place to start.
What’s coming up
One more from the hardest worker in the room
Four weeks ago Etta delivered eight puppies in the small hours of a May morning. Today those puppies can stand, walk, hear, argue, and — as of this week — feed themselves, a little. She’s still nursing them, still topping off everything the pan doesn’t cover, but for the first time the load is starting to lift off her shoulders and onto ours.
She raised eight newborns into eight loud, hungry little dogs in twenty-eight days. As always: when you collect your puppy in late July, thank Etta first.
We’ll keep the camera rolling — and the pan full.
— Albert & Terra
Three Doves Performance Dogs — AKC Breeder of Merit, English Springer Spaniel
www.three-doves.com · info@three-doves.com · 636-751-3971
