It has been 10 long years since we’ve welcomed a puppy into our home! Since then, we had our “two pack” (Ellie and Lexi) for years. About 4 years ago we were planning on bringing a puppy home and starting to figure out the logistics of it all, and then before we knew it covid hit and the world shut down. With it, so did our kennel, and Stryker (the Great Dane/Mastiff mix we had taken in for training and rehoming) suddenly came to live with us in our house and the rest is history. You can read that story
here if you’d like! Then in April of this year, we lost our girl Ellie after a very long life of 13 years. We really needed time for our hearts to heal after that.
The puppy conversation started coming back around and we all started getting ready for the cuteness, the puppy breath, the little barks, the potty breaks, the hours and hours of work, and the puppy love! We were finally ready – and we welcomed Kiah into our lives on October 28th!
We are going to take you along on our journey raising her – we can already tell she’s going to be a sweet, smart, confident, self-assured, well rounded and playful pup! We are having a ton of fun!
What we’ve done so far:
Slow introductions to our pack. We just want them all to coexist together, they don’t need to play or force a relationship that isn’t there yet. We are making sure the puppy is appropriate with the older dogs, who can tire easily and need space to sleep. We are rewarding the older dogs’ good behavior around the puppy with lots of praise and pets, and then we’re giving them down time in separate rooms.
We have started obedience training with her – sit, lay down, and “whistle training” (recall). We are doing small sessions (just a few minutes) so we don't overwhelm her little mind, and if she is starting to get frustrated, we end on a good note and move onto playing with her (then letting her nap).
We are starting to crate train her.
She takes naps in her crate when she gets tired during the day. Even just now I took a break from writing because she had woken up. She made a little noise and I came around the corner and she was just sitting in her crate waiting for me! I let her outside for a potty break and then I started to play with her but she was still exhausted. Back in the crate she went and within minutes she was out again (oh my goodness the puppy snores!). When I walked by her crate to come back to the computer she woke up for a second, but felt confident enough to go right back to sleep. She is learning to be by herself which is a great thing to teach a young pup! This time of her life is so pivotal, and it would be very easy to give in and be around her all the time (especially because she WANTS to be around us all the time). But that will only create separation anxiety in the future, and I want to slowly build her confidence around being alone in short bursts. It’s a fine line between taking advantage of this time when they want to be near you 24/7, and creating a dependency. You do not want a full-grown dog velcro-ed to your side, so make sure to allow the space for them to feel good in their own skin without you around while they’re young! (Side note – also don’t leave them alone for too long…I know, fine line!)
We bring her outside all the time! She has been doing so well with potty training, so we are really capitalizing on that. The more often she goes outside, the more often we can praise her for it, and the quicker she learns. Even if she’s not sniffing around like she has to go to the bathroom, we just bring her outside anyways and wait for her to go. For a pup this young they may need to go potty only 10 minutes after drinking water!
We are introducing her to new things. We brought the vacuum out for her to acquaint herself with – after all, she’s going to be seeing it a lot in a house with 2 kids, 3 dogs and a cat! I haven’t turned it on yet, I'm just letting her check it out. I also let her smell her brush and her nail trimmer, although I haven’t used them yet. At this stage it’s all about desensitizing her to things she’s going to encounter regularly. We’ve also been touching her paws and looking in her mouth like a veterinarian would. Remember to take it slow with things like this, it can be easy to rush it but it's better to let it all evolve organically!
All this to say – we are a few days in, and we are all totally in love and can’t really remember what we did without her! Stay tuned for more Kiah posts in the days (weeks, months!) to come! 😊
