The first night!
The first week is all about allowing your puppy to settle in and having positive first impressions. Allow your new family member to get to know the people in your immediate family before have extended family and friends over. It’s best to wait for NEXT week to introduce new people (maybe have a puppy party).
Introduce the crate! Crates are a great place to put your puppy when you can’t watch her, at night time, when you leave the house.
Place some old towels or blankets in the crate. If you received a blanket or towel from the breeder, place this in the crate- it smells like his mother and litter mates. Don’t put expensive bedding in there, you should wait to see if the puppy is a bed destroyer.
Step one: Open the door of the crate and let puppy investigate. Toss really good treats inside. Praise her when she goes inside to get the food. Don’t force her to go in and don’t close the door behind her.
Step two: Leave the crate door open all day. Keep randomly placing food and toys into the back of the crate. Puppy will catch on to this game and start to see the crate as a magical portal from which good things mysteriously come. Any meals can be fed in the crate to reinforce positive associations with being inside the crate.
Step three: Once puppy is happily going in and out of the crate, you can start closing the door behind her. Start by keeping it closed for just a few seconds, and work your way up to longer periods of time. Always open the door before she gets anxious. Give lots of praise and treats when the door is closed especially.
Start house training
Housetraining is all about:
Close supervision. Watch her like a hawk when she’s free to roam the house. When you can’t watch her, she should be in her crate or x-pen with a potty pad. Most dogs treat their crates like their bedrooms, and no one likes to soil their bedroom. So she’ll be less likely to have an accident in her crate as long as you don’t keep her in there for too long.
Frequent trips to the bathroom. Puppies lack the physical control to “hold it” for very long. Ideally, you should take the puppy out every hour until you get to know her. Your puppy may need more or less often. A puppy under four months of age should never go more than three hours without a bathroom trip.
Rewarding the pup for good potty behavior. When she goes in the right place, praise and offer a few treats.
Get through the first few nights
To survive your puppy’s first nights with your sanity intact, there are two things you must understand:
- Puppy will be a little bit scared.
- You are not going to get much sleep.
Decide where puppy will sleep. I strongly recommend letting her sleep in your bedroom. She doesn’t know what’s going on. Sleeping near you will be reassuring. You’ll have a better shot at getting some sleep, since Bella is less likely to howl and carry on if she can see you. You don’t have to let her sleep in your room forever – just until she’s comfortable in your home. For the first few nights, I had my puppy in a small carrier crate and put that on my night stand so I could stick my fingers through the bars when he started crying.
Set up her own bed. If you spent the day getting her used to the crate and she’s taken to it nicely, use that. Place it right next to the bed so you can reach over and reassure her as needed. If puppy freaks out when she gets locked in the crate, you can use a dog bed, and a leash to tether her to a sturdy piece of furniture. You don’t want her getting up during the night to take a bathroom break on your carpet.
Right before bed, take her to her potty area, then put her to bed with a delicious chew toy. She’ll probably whine for a while. Stick your fingers through the crate bars to reassure her briefly. Then ignore the whining. When she stops whining, you can toss a treat into the crate to reward the quiet.
If she’s quiet for a while but starts whining again, she might have to go. A two month old puppy may need to go out as little as 30 minutes after her last bathroom trip.
Schedule a vet visit
Take them to the vet ASAP. Your vet can tell you what vaccines your puppy needs, whether she has worms, and alert you to any possible health concerns. Most importantly, this is an opportunity for socialization. Taking your pup to the vet early on will get her used to the experience. Try to make it positive; feed her treats, maybe play with a toy in the exam room. Your pup will start to get into a good vet visit habit and be easier to handle at the vet’s office when she’s older and larger.
In Part 1 of what to do with puppy we talked about the benefits of chew toys, here are a list of good options, I recommend getting a handful of DIFFERENT toys, so you can rotate and see what your puppy likes most!
Some tasty choices include:
- Carrots (chilled carrots are great for soothing teething puppies)
- Nylabones
- Kongs filled with food (wet dog food and then freeze it)
- Bully sticks
- Antler chews
Keep a stash of about ten toys. Rotate through them so Bella doesn’t get bored. Make three or four available at all times. A good place to shop for toys (good prices and variety) is: Chewy
Any time you see her chewing on a dog toy (instead of your valuables) reward her with praise and a treat.
