Life with a puppy has been interesting. And by that I mean fun and frustrating. She’s currently 10 weeks old and potty training has had its ups and downs. She has peed on the carpet several times and even though she has gone to the door to let us know she has to potty, she’s not consistent about it yet. This morning she peed and pooped in her crate even though I had taken her outside where she had peed just an hour before.
The first week was the worst simply because it felt like we had no free time to do ANYTHING and the house was cluttered and dirty. Once we cleaned up a bit we both felt better.
Now things are in a better routine. She usually wakes us up once in the night to go potty. She sleeps in a crate downstairs and I bought a $17 V-Tech baby monitor so we can hear when she needs to go out. We didn’t want to keep her in the bedroom for now since at first Joe seemed to be having an allergic reaction to her. He has gotten better since then but I’ve noticed after handling her I develop a bit of a cough. It might be to the overly scented shampoo I purchased, however. I didn’t realize it was baby powder scented! It is really strong too!
The good news is other than the $150 we gave the woman we adopted her from, and some canned food, pretty much everything else we’ve purchased for her has been on Amazon where we have/had credit, so there were minimal out of pocket costs. In addition to the carrier and crate we got these cute food bowls.
We also bought a large exercise pen which connects to the crate. We put that up in the kitchen when we have to go out for longer than an hour. She barks a little at first but then calms down and goes into her crate to nap. We are using the webcam that was in the rat room to monitor her and I leave The Cure playing softly to soothe her.
Overall I’d say this experience has been both rewarding yet something I wouldn’t want to repeat. It’s cool that we have a hand in shaping her behavior since we got her so young but it’s a lot of work! I turned to Joe last night when we were trying to watch tv and she wouldn’t stop barking in her crate and said, “Yep, my decision not to have kids was the right one. At least with her this should be over in six months”.
But I still love her so much. Look how adorable she is! At some point we’ll figure out her name. I told Joe people on Facebook are getting frustrated that we haven’t chosen one but hell, parents get nine months to choose a name, we should get at least a couple of weeks.
