Puppies

Hi everybody. We’re here with the shake it up puppies and this is their three week update. These Australian labradoodles are going to be medium size and they’re all black or black and white parties. And we’re going to talk about all the things that they’ve accomplished this past week. We’re going to try and hold them in place until we talk about each one of them. Give you a little bit of an update on Breezy and then we’re going to talk about some things that you’re going to have to help you out when you’re getting ready for your puppy to come home.

So I have my book here so we can go through their weights first of all. And one of the very first things that you’ll notice is that they are talking. So you’ll hear quite a bit of conversation coming from these puppies now. They have all found their voices, they all can hear now. That is the major change for them this week is that their ears up all opened and they’re all fully interactive with us and each other. And they also have started on their solid food. So several of them are going to have bits and pieces of their meals all over them. It’s not a good idea to wash puppies when they’re this young. We do give them all a bath before their puppy family visit and we’d like to restrict it so they only have that one bath before they go home with you. So we let them get a little bit crusty and it also helps them learn how to eat the solid food, because they lick it off of each other as they’re learning how to actually get it out of the pan.

So let’s get started and we’re going to start off here with this baby here. And this puppy is one of the boys, one of the two boys and talkative and he has a black collar on, but that’s because he was green collar. But we have changed him to black collar because he grew out ofbaby collar and we don’t have any bigger ones in green. Mr. Black collar weighs 1.3 kilograms. So he’s a great size. So we’re going to let him go down and wander around and maybe he won’t bark quite so much.

Now we’ve got yellow collar girl, and here she is. She’s doing great and she’s the one that you’ll remember has phantom markings. So she has some brown eyebrows and the spots on her parti color are a little bit brown as well on the side of her face. And Miss yellow collar weighs 1.6 kilograms. I believe that makes her … No, she’s the second biggest in the litter. So that’s yellow color that we’ll just put over here.

The biggest in the litter is this one here, brown collar. And brown collar last week was the loudest one and you can see he has quite a collection of food on him. Brown collar is no longer the loudest out of everybody, but he is the biggest at 1.7 kilograms. So that’s brown collar.

Now let’s do one of the blacks and here we have orange collar. And you can see on the blacks, their pablum and pumpkin really shows up a lot. So obviously somebody has been having quite a good meal off of orange’s black back I mean. And orange is 1.39 kilograms now. So he’s not one of the bigger puppies, but certainly one of the more vocal ones. We hear from orange collar quite at bit.

Now I see purple’s trying to escape here. Come on purple. Purple is another one of the black and white parties and purple also has these phantom markings. That’s the tam points on the eyebrows there. And for her that’s about the only tam points that she has. And the purple weighs 1.4 kilograms. So they’re all getting to be a really good size.

Pink collar looks like she’s about the next one to escape. So we’ll bring her over and she too, you can see has been walking through her food a lot, so that she has lots of pablum and pumpkin on her paws. And pink collar is 1.43 kilograms and just a cutie too.

And now we’ve come to some of them more sleepy poppies and the more quiet ones. So you were going to wake a couple of them up here. And here we have Miss. peach. Peach collar girl is the tiniest puppy in the litter and she weighs 1.05 kilograms. She’s also the quietest one at this point, so I suspect those two things go hand in hand. And I’m going to put her back in the bed since she was still actually sleeping.

Then we’ve got blue collar, dark blue collar, and this puppy is the one that is showing us all of the sable markings. So sable looks very similar to the phantom, but it goes throughout the whole area, not just on tam points. So you’ll see everywhere where this puppy used to be black is now turning into Brown, which is the sable color. And blue, dark blue collar weighs 1.41 kilograms. And I’ll just put this puppy back in the bed too, because these are the sleeping ones. Might as well let sleeping dogs lie. Yeah, that’s quite the conversation.

And here’s red collar. Red Collar’s got the beautiful little bit of white on the chest and some little toes dipped in white, although right now that white is covered in pablum. And red collar is weighing 1.27 kilograms. So another one of the puppies on the smaller side of things and just a little doll, has the cutest little face.

And last but not least and sound asleep over here is our gray cololar girl. Hello sweetie. And she too is covered in food as you can see. And gray collar girl weighs 1.3 kilograms. So she’s one of the tinier ones too.

So that’s all their weights and a little bit of information on them and you can certainly are going to hear them for the rest of the video, I’m quite sure. Now you’ll see that they’re out and about, they’re cruising around easily, making noise and we have them on the pee pads and you’ll see that the pee pads already been used. And we also have a couple of toys out for them. These toys are stuffless and they’re crinkly, and this one doesn’t have a squeaker in it, but most of them do. I imagine this one doesn’t have a squeaker because Ripple or one of the big dogs has taken it out. But they like these, they’re good, they’re soft, they can’t get into stuffing and swallow something they ought not to. So they’re really good toys, and usually what we start the puppies up off on. And they just, they love this sound. Catches their attention, now that you can see that they’re all listening and have their ears open.

And now you’ll see too, we had them all in this bed here. This type of bed is called a donut bed. Dogs love these beds because it gives them a nice support all the ways around. And this one is really good, because you can fold it down so you can have part of it folded down. You can fold the whole thing down. It can go halfway down or all the ways down. Whatever you want to do, depending on the size of your dog and the age of your dog. So I have it all the ways up because that’s the best way for us to be able to move the puppies around.

We are in our studio, where we filmed the video, so we moved the puppies from their bed into here to do the videos. We have 27 puppies right now and if we filmed in the doodle den with everyone else, it was even louder than these are and you wouldn’t hear a thing. And I would say that this group of 11 puppies is the most talkative group we have ever had. Miss yellow is the most interactive communicator in the world. Now sometimes people think, “Well that’s not a very good thing. I don’t think I want the puppy that’s so talkative.” But really what that is is a puppy who is so easily communicating with you. That’s a puppy who wants you to understand them and wants to be able to tell you what they’re thinking. So those are the puppies that often turn out to be the therapy type of dog that we’re looking for. So, even though at first it sounds like a cheeky little brat, really that usually ends up being the puppy who is the most intuitive and has the most communication skills with humans. Not always. So we shall just have to see.

And also I just wanted to point out that just because one puppy is talkitive this week definitely doesn’t mean that that is the puppy who is going to be talkative in two weeks from now or even next week. Last week Brown was the one who we couldn’t keep quiet and was telling us everything. And that changed into orange being the big talker this week. And now we have yellow sort of at the top of the list for talking.

And one other thing we’ve done is we’ve moved the puppies from the maternity ward into the nursery. So they’re in the doodle den now along with the razzle dazzle puppies and the cafe noire puppies. The cafe noire puppies are going home on Saturday, so they won’t be with them for too long. They’re each in their own separate area, but they all know that one another is there. They can hear each other, smell each other, and they know there’s other puppies around. So it’s great for them. It’s their first experience with understanding that they’re not the only dogs in the world. And it gives them all sorts of new learning opportunities. And it also hopefully will let us sleep a bit more through the night as we don’t have to listen to yellow or orange talking during the night when they’re playing with one another. They can really have a lot of fun in the night.

So Breezy’s not with us, but she is in the doodle den waiting for her babies to come back and enjoying a well earned break from them. She’s doing a really good job with her puppies. She’s very attentive and very caring towards them all. She’s getting a little bit tired of nursing as much as she has to. She has to eat a huge amount of food to keep up with their demands. So that’s why we have them started on their solid food. So these guys were really quick in learning their solid food and the solid food is comprised of goat’s milk, pablum and pumpkin. And the reason for the goat’s milk is it’s very close in composition to canine mama milk. So it’s a very easy transition for the puppies to make. They don’t tend to get diarrhea or constipated from it or any sort of a stomach upset. They do really well on it. It’s a very rich milk, so it’s really good for providing them with lots of calories, fat and protein. And of course a good deal of calcium as well. And the pumpkin is in there because that helps all dogs regulate their internal systems, their digestive systems. Our dogs, our grownup dogs eat pumpkin as well. We put everybody on pumpkin. It just helps keep everybody’s systems running nice and smoothly.

And the pablum that we use is just the same as human pablum. It’s the plain rice pablum and boy is it ever getting hard to find pablum that’s not got some kind of berry or some kind of something added to it. It’s just the plain old, regular, old fashioned pablum. It’s getting to be harder and harder to locate. But that’s what we give them because it has the fewest ingredients. And it’s the simplest thing for them to eat and digest. So we keep them on that till they’re about five to six weeks and then we’ll switch them off over to their raw food, and we’ll talk about that more at the time when we do that switch.

So they’re starting to nurse a little bit less. Usually at around this time is when mom’s starts to instinctively back off a little bit from nursing. By next week at four weeks she’ll be seriously backing off. Not a huge amount of quantity, but she’ll be more serious about the getting them to eat on their own more. So they eat about four pans of food a day right now. Sometimes Breezy finishes it up and that’s fine ’cause it’s good for her too. So that’s what the kids are all doing. Breezy, as I said, is doing great. She’s eating a ton of food. She has a really healthy appetite. She’s very happy. She’s a very content dog. She’s running around outside having a great time and she seems to really truly enjoy being a mom to her puppies. It’s really nice to watch her come and care for them and she does lick a lot of the food off of them, but you can tell she doesn’t do a complete thorough job. The pablum and the pumpkin are very sticky.

So that’s what everybody’s been up to this past week. It’s really fun now that they can hear and interact with us and be what we call “real dogs”. [inaudible 00:13:22] talking to me and their little sounds like that are just the most fun to listen to, except at three in the morning. Then it’s not so much fun, is it? No, that is not so much fun. I’m going to put Mr. Green now black in here and see if maybe he’ll settle down a bit. So what I want to talk about today is a little bit about things at home and getting organized with your family, so that everything’s in place and will work really well for your puppy. So we can sort of set you up for success, the kids up for success and most importantly, the puppy up for success.

If you’ll go back and look through our blonde brownies videos and also our cafe noire ones, both of those litters at week three, we talk about how to set your house up and things to take into consideration. So have a look at those videos and that will give you more practical advice in terms of what you need to think of as a family. The other thing it will do is talk a fair bit about naming your puppy and that’s something that you might want to sit down as a family around now and start going through. But please watch those two videos first or one or the other of them and get some information from me about picking a name and picking locations for things.

So what I want to talk to you about is first of all, puppies and their teeth. ‘Cause these puppies are all getting their teeth now. So right now I can put my finger in and I can let them chew on my finger and it doesn’t hurt at all. And they aren’t even all that interested in shooting on me yet. Now, if this was the razzle dazzle litter, and if you watched their update at their five week update, you’ll see that they’ll be chomping on my finger right away and I’ll be moving my finger because their teeth are like little needles. They’re very sharp. So when you have kids, one of the things you want to be sure to do is not have them get hurt by the puppy. And we don’t want them to be surprised and have an owwie on their finger or have the puppy bite them anywhere else. But we have to teach kids and adults, how do you get your puppy not to bite so much? Puppies just simply have to bite. It’s just hardwired into them because that’s how their teeth come through. It’s just like a child when they’re teething, they have to have something in their mouth. They drool and they chew and chew and chew to have the teeth break through the gums.

But what puppies do when they’re playing with one another is of course they bite each other and you’ll hear them making all the sounds like they’re making right now. And that’s what we call, how we use bite inhibition. So we use what puppies do naturally to teach them not to bite people. So when you have a puppy that comes, and let’s use you with the big mouth Miss Pink. If your puppy’s coming up and you’re petting your puppy and your puppy bites you, you’re going to go ow, like that because that’s the sound that they know means, hey, back off, I’ve just hurt my sibling and something’s not right here. So they understand that language. They’re not old enough to understand all of our no, quit or whatever cues we’re going to have to tell our puppy not to bite us. And they have no idea they’re hurting us of course, they have no intention of hurting us. They’re just doing what they should, that they think they should be doing.

So you want to respond in a way that they understand. So you make that sharp ow, and make a big production out of it. And then you do your level best to not give them any attention whatsoever for at least hopefully 20 seconds. Aim for 20 and if you can do 10, then that’s pretty much an achievement. And that means no eye contact, no physical contact, nothing. So if the puppy’s on the ground and you’re playing, you just do this, you just look away and you don’t touch the puppy at all and try to count to 20. and then if that’s successful, great, then you pick the puppy back up and you start over again.

The other thing you always want to do when you’re playing with your puppy and you want to teach your kids, is to always have something they should put in their mouth. So a chew toy or any kind of toy. So when you’re playing, you’re not going like this on the puppies mouth and on the puppy’s face, which only encourages them to bite you, but you have the toy that you’re putting near to the puppy and saying, “Here, this is what you should be playing with. This is how you’re going to play, not with my finger.” So those are the main things that you’re going to want to be prepared with and want to teach your kids. So always have a toy in your hand, so you don’t want to have your hands around the puppies mouth and doing this and encouraging them to bite you. You want to have this around the puppy’s mouth and encourage them to bite the toy or the chew or whatever you happen to have, and then do the sharp ow and try not to pay any attention to them. And that is the best way to teach your puppy, not to be biting you or your kids. And that’s called bite inhibition. And I’m sure if you Google it, you can probably find even more of an exploration explanation on it than that.

Now the other thing I want to talk about his beds. So we talked a little bit about this bed and this being a doughnut bed. I love these beds. These beds are available in all sorts of different fabrics from Vagabond pet supply, which is Canadian. Yay. They’re actually located in Alberta. The beds are fully washable. The inside comes out and you can throw everything in the washer and the dryer. And this fabric is beautiful. It’s so soft and cuddly. And I’m not sure if [inaudible 00:19:15] can see the puppy that’s in here. Probably not. Maybe I can move the bed. But they just collapse into it and completely fall to sleep. So it’s excellent for when you want to put your puppy down for a nap. If they have a nice, cozy, warm thing to cuddle up in, they’re going to be settling down and napping much more easily than if they’re in an open bed or something that’s not as comfy.

So that’s where this doughnut shape comes in, because this provides them with security. It provides them with a measure of safety in terms of they’re not going to roll out. And it also provides them with a feeling that they’re somewhat protected from outside intrusions. And as I said earlier and showed you before, the bed rolls down. So all you have to do is do this if you want to make it just to be a pillow and when your dog gets older or you can roll it right the way down so your puppy can easily get in and out. Now this size is a medium. This is going to be probably about the size I would suggest that you might consider purchasing for when you bring your puppy home and that will last for quite a while. And if you have the sides rolled right the way down, then it’s going to last your dog for even when your puppy is grown up and a bit older, because they’ll just lie right across it. They won’t have the same need to be right in the full enclosure of the donut. And then for as an adult you’ll probably want to switch and get the next size or two up from that, and then that will easily accommodate your puppy when they’re full grown.

Your puppies are going to range between probably maybe 36 pounds up to probably about 46 to 48 pounds in size, depending on which one goes home with you. So you have to just wait for a few months and see how big your puppy’s going to get. Normally by about six to eight months you’ll have a really good idea of what their size is going to be. They’ll be pretty close to full size then. They don’t usually grow that much more in terms of height, but they fill out a bit more. So you’ll have a really good idea by then. And these beds are not so expensive that you’ll feel like you’re wasting your money by buying one now and then buying another one later. And as I said, if you roll it down, your dog will still lie over top of it and really enjoy the nice soft fleece that’s very, very comforting to them.

So I really recommend these beds. It’s the first time that I’ve bought them and I’m really impressed with the quality, the craftsmanship and I really like how much all of our dogs are enjoying them. Our grown up dogs fit in here, our minis can fit in here, our grownup minis and it’s great for the puppies. They’re really, really enjoying it. It’s a nice cozy spot for them.

Now you’re going to want to have also a really nice crate mat for your puppy, ’cause you want the crate to be an important and comfy spot. And we’re going to talk a little bit about crates now. So your puppy, now that he’s moving out of the maternity ward and into the nursery, is going to have their first create experience. There will be a crate in their area and Breezy may choose to nurse them in the crate but she definitely will go in the crate and they will go in the crate with her and they will learn right from the beginning the crate is a good place. The crate’s where mom is, the crate’s where I’m safe, the crate is where I get food. So that is how we start them off, so that they started off with a really positive, great experience and that sets them up for success with the crate and you too for using a crate.

A crate is like a little house for your dog. It’s their little quiet spot. It’s where they can go. It’s their bedroom really. Just like your child has their room to go to and that’s their sanctuary and hopefully you have a sanctuary in your home as well. Your puppy needs a sanctuary, somewhere where your puppy can go where they can say, “Okay, no more children, no more adults, no more nothing. Just give me my space. I need to relax, I need to sleep and I need to know that I’m going to be safe and nobody’s going to come and disturb me here.” That’s their crate. The crate is so important for your puppy to have that feeling of security. It really helps make a nice, calm, balanced dog.

And it also means you can go visit anywhere at anytime with your puppy, whether it’s still a baby or grown up and all you have to do is bring your crate and you can pop your puppy in there, know that your dog is going to be comfy and there’s no problem with visiting in a Condo, in a hotel or wherever it is you may want to go. Or even if you have, heaven forbid, friends who don’t really enjoy dogs, but you wanted to take your dog with you, you could put your dog in the crate and your dog’s not going to bother those people. I’m sure you don’t have friends that don’t like dogs though. I can’t imagine you would. So crates are really important.

Now crates come in different types of material. You can get a wire crate which is similar to what the x pans are and you can have a plastic crate and you can have a soft crate. So I’m not a fan of the wire crates. I don’t like them at all. They don’t provide any measure of a feeling of a home or a roof and an enclosure for the dog. It looks like a cage. I don’t like the whole look of it. To me it makes me uncomfortable, and I’ve never had a dog that really preferred a wire crate to a plastic crate. You have to buy a separate cover if you have a wire crate so that the wires are all enclosed in order to provide any benefit to your dog.

Now the reason why some people like them is they’re a lot easier to clean because you can just open the door and pull the tray out, clean the tray and put it back in. Yeah. It’s not that hard to clean the plastic ones, I can reach, I’m not very tall and I can reach inside and reach everything in the crate. If you had a real wreck, if your dog had some horrible vomiting experience and there was mess everywhere, the crates come apart really easily with just a few screws, they break in half. So it’s really easy to hose them out and clean them off as well. So I’ve never had any concerns with keeping them clean, and they really do provide a nicer, warmer, more secure environment for your dog. And by warmer, I don’t mean heat, I mean warmer in terms of cozy and friendly and puppy friendly and dog friendly. It’s just a much nicer environment for them.

And the soft sided crates, they collapse and they’re fantastic for traveling or if you go camping or your dog goes in the car, you go to a hotel. When Reynold and I used to go to Arizona for the winters, we would take our dogs’ crates, they would all be collapsible. We called them their tents and they would travel in the car and they would be all folded up. When we got to the hotel, we just opened them up, they have their crate and they have a nice good sized one, very comfortable with it. And they were totally relaxed and felt they had their own bedroom with them. And then the house we rented where we stayed in Arizona, that’s what their beds were. That was what they used was there collapsible crate. So it worked out really, really well. But you want to wait until your puppy has finished teething. So I would not buy a collapsible soft sided crate until your dog is about six months old. Otherwise they’re quite likely to chew it to bits.

And if you ever have an emergency, if your dog has any sort of an emergency, they’re also able to get out of the soft sided crate. So one time when we were in Arizona, Tatiana who was one of our dogs, she had an upset stomach and she just had to go to the bathroom and there was no way she was going to go in her crate. So she actually was able to claw the doorway open, separate it from the soft sided crate, get out and go onto the tiled floor to do our business. We weren’t home at the time. So that’s one thing to know and to keep in mind as well. It’s not secure like a wire crate or a regular plastic crate, your dog can get out of it. So you don’t ever want to be putting your dog in a soft sided crate thinking that your dog is fully secured, because that’s not the case. But it’s also nice to know that if there’s something, some reason they have to get out when you’re not there, they can. So that’s a little bit about the crates.

The size you’re going to want for your dog is not too big. What you want is the size of crate that is just large enough for your dog to be in, turn around, and that’s about it. They don’t need to be able to sit in the crate. They don’t need to be able to stand in the crate. Now however, there’s one exception. If you’re going to be flying with your dog. If you’re going to be traveling, say too, if you have a second home in Mexico or Arizona or some other lovely location, and you fly there each time you go to visit, then you need an airline approved crate and that will be a plastic crate that has a handle on the top. That’s the only difference between airline approved and non airline approved, is that handle. And the airline will require that your dog can sit up in the crate. So keep that in mind.

Now if you want to buy the full size crate right from the get go, there’s no reason for you to buy a little tiny one and then keep buying bigger ones. I’m going to suggest to you that you buy the medium sized crate. Checkers was the biggest dog that we had. He weighed 56 pounds and he was 22 inches high. So he is at the top of what any of these dogs are going to weigh. I don’t expect any of these dogs to be quite that large, and he always preferred a medium sized crate, and that’s about 22 by 22 by 24. Those measurements are just approximate. Every brand will vary.

And speaking of vary, if you are wanting an airline crate it’s Bari Kennel B-A-R-I kennel that makes the airline approved crates. You can buy crates at Walmart, Amazon, PetSmart, all over the place. Prices vary widely. Quality is not that much different. Generally speaking, if you can get them on sale at PetSmart or at Walmart, those are your best prices. Sometimes Amazon has some really great deals. The Bari kennels are definitely more expensive. But if you are going on the plane, that is what you’re going to have to have. Because you sure don’t want to have your vacation all planned, get to the desk and check in to be told no, you can’t get on because your crate’s not the right type of crate. So you want to be sure about that.

So when you get your puppy home, your puppy’s not going to be that big and the crate is going to be medium and your puppy’s going to be able to walk from one end back to the other. And if they really wanted go to the bathroom in one and and sleep in the other. So this is something we don’t want to have happen. The puppies are naturally inclined to not go to the bathroom where they sleep once they get to be about six weeks old. It takes a little bit of learning, ’cause right now they’ll sleep on the pee pad where they peed, but by six weeks they’ve pretty much stopped doing that. So what you want to do is just get a box or something where you can block the crate off, so that it’s just enough room for your puppy. And we have a smaller crate over there and maybe Reynold can just pass it to me and we can just show you what the smaller crate looks like. And this is about the most amount of room that you need to allow for your puppy.

I’m not sure the exact dimensions of this crate. I really like this crate. We use it quite a bit for when the puppies are really little. This is not the crate I’m suggesting you get, thank you, permanently but you can see how much space there is for your puppy in this crate. It’s not a lot of space and that’s all your puppy is going to need to start off with. I’ll just put it over here so you don’t have to take it back out there if you don’t want to, Reynold. This one, it’s 24 inches long is all that it says on it. And this is a two door crate. It has a door here. And the top opens. You won’t be able to get one like that for an adult crate.

If you do want to get two, this is great to start off with because as a puppy when you’re working with a puppy, it’s way easier to put your puppy in and out through the top, then it is through this front door. So we got this, I believe at PetSmart and I can’t recall the exact price of it, but it wasn’t really all that expensive. You can go online at PetSmart and order a lot of these things to be just ready for you to pick up at the store or to be delivered to you. I don’t really like dealing with big box stores, but PetSmart does have some really good deals and Reynold was just saying to me, he thinks it was $40 that we paid for this. So it’s not a huge investment and it is really handy. You could use it for a cat if you happen to have a cat, but it’s certainly not going to be big enough for when your puppies an adult.

This is what your puppy’s going to sleep in at night is in a crate. This is what you’re going to want to have when you’re house training your puppy is a crate, so that when you’re busy and you’re doing something, you have somewhere safe and secure to put your puppy when you can’t have your eyes on your puppy. The other thing you’re going to want to do is have a very special toy and a very special treat that goes in the crate and nowhere else. This way, your puppy always associates the crate with good things. You can even feed your puppy in the crate. I recommend to people that they do that for the first while. And leave the door open during the day, so puppy can go in and out of the crate. Usually they will pick that to sleep in more than anywhere else.

Now we were talking about beds, crate beds for the crate. What I recommend is you get one that has a similar material to this, a nice soft fleece and one that’s really easy to wash because you’re going to want to wash it regularly. Quite often, when your dogs, our dogs have been outside, if they’re a little bit wet and muddy and dirty, we will put them in their crates until they dry off, we let them drip dry in there. So we do wash their beds quite a bit. So the company, this Vagabond pet supplies, which I will give you the link for, they make crate beds that are beautiful and they’re just the same quality as this. Easy to wash and dry. They can go even in the dryer, most crate mats can’t go in the dryer.

And the crate mats have this same nice soft material and they come in about, I think it’s about 15 different patterns. So I’m sure you’ll find one that you like. So that’s the type that I would recommend. You can buy them anywhere and you can buy all sorts of different ones. And I would suggest you have probably, I don’t know, probably three or four, so that you can have a couple in the wash and a couple that are clean. In the summer, you might want to get one of the mats that is a cooling mat, ’cause sometimes dogs get a little bit too heated. So you might want to look at investing in one of those once summertime rolls around. So that’s about it for beds and crates which are two important things. And just in relation to those, one thing that I really want to stress for those of you who have children is figuring out now and making a schedule as to where the puppy is going to sleep. Who is the puppy going to sleep with? Is puppy going to sleep with you as the parents? Is puppy going to sleep with one child one night, one child another night? How are you going to work it?

Things to take into consideration. Chances are for the first maybe week, maybe even two weeks, your puppy may have to get up during the night to go to the bathroom. So a six year old, even an eight year old is probably not responsible enough and it’s probably not desirable to interrupt their sleep, to have them take the puppy out. It’s really important that the puppy is able to get out of their crate to go to the bathroom as soon as they’ve requested that they need to do so. So my recommendation is that the puppy sleep in the adult bedroom at least until they don’t have to get up during the night. You may be lucky and have one of the puppies that never needs to go out during the night. Usually in every litter, about 75% of the puppies start off right away with not needing to go out at night and about 25% of them do for a few nights. It also helps your puppy get just a little bit settled in and adjusting to living with children and with you. So that’s my recommendation. It’s of course totally up to you, but I would suggest that you have things worked out with your kids beforehand. After that, who is the puppy going to be sleeping with and what will the rules be?

If you want your puppy to be sleeping in a crate, make sure you don’t have a child who’s going to sneak the puppy into their bed. Because once the puppy sleeps in someone’s bed, that’s where the puppy is going to think it should always sleep. So just be forewarned about that. And that’s the main thing, is just working with your kids ahead of time and making sure that expectations are in place for your children. Making sure they understand that that puppies do bite, and they don’t mean to hurt you, they’re just playing. Puppies claws can be sharp and puppies will destroy your toys and your tablet and your cell phone if you don’t remember to pick them up. So lots of things to go over with your kids. And sometimes just with one another. I sometimes am very guilty of leaving things out and having a dog destroy it or pee on it or something like that.

So that’s your topics for today. I hope you’ve enjoyed the video. I hope you enjoyed seeing the puppies. It’s lots of fun having them around. I’m glad they lost their voices for a bit there. They can be quite talkative and peaches just had the best sleep here. She’s been upside down in this cuddle bed the whole time. She’s really enjoyed it and she’s just now starting to wake up because they’ll be getting ready to have another feeding with Breezy soon. So that’s all your puppies for this week. We’ll be back next week. No video because it is our family visit. So all of the families will be getting an email from me about that shortly, and we can’t wait to meet you and introduce you to these 11 beautiful little labradoodles. If you liked our video, please give us a thumbs up and we hope that you subscribe to our channel. And thanks so much for watching.