Puppy Go Bag: Preparing for a puppy after losing our family dog

We’re getting a puppy! What kind? A fox-red-lab-female, from a breeder in Northern Wisconsin, one week from this Saturday. I thought it might be interesting to capture this adventure here because, as my husband is telling me, the weeks between 8-20 are especially important for early socializing. Plus, it’s bound to be quite entertaining. I know very little to exactly nothing about training a puppy. I’m sure it will be just as much about training us! It’s going to be a learning experience for sure. I hope to record my journey semi-regularly, starting with sharing how I’m preparing for a puppy after losing our family dog Savannah. Read My best girl,Savy

Space for grief and a new puppy too
I love to make space for things, to categorize and sort. I used to be a Professional Organizer, so it comes instinctively for me. You’ll notice I mentioned a puppy go bag in the title. Containers and bags are another passion of mine. I’ll get to that in a bit. I really wanted to put a ‘1’ in front of this paragraph but I won’t. It helps me to feel in control to have a path from point A to point B, or to identify steps one can take. Grief feels like being completely out of control. There is no point A to point B, no singular path. Knowing this has been helpful, but also really annoying. I haven’t wanted to feel stuck while waiting to be done grieving before getting another dog. The urge to fill a missing part of our family is not going away either. I’ve been learning that the grief is still going to come no matter if we get a dog or not. Like a wave when I’m least expecting it, I will continue to feel the loss of Savy and can still be excited to get a puppy too. I can navigate the grief and feel her love, knowing there is always more room in my heart for more love. There will be space for this puppy, you bet. I’ll make sure of it.

Laborer (not Labrador) Training Center
When I first moved to the area we drove by a training center and I misread the sign. I go to my husband: “Hey look! There’s a place you can train labs!” I thought the word “Laborer” was “Labrador.” My husband had been reading books about agility training, and although our dog was six years old at the time he had shared that he’d like to get a puppy some day to train. Knowing this about him was one of the first steps in deciding what age of dog we’d get. If we were to get another, he wanted a fresh start, a dog that he could train from the beginning. Savy was a year old when we got her, a rescue, and came with some baggage. She was very reactive to other dogs. Sweet girl, but so hard to walk. We never took her to dog parks. We’d love to be able to do that some day with a dog. After she died, he reminded me that he wanted a puppy, another female. We agreed he would be the primary trainer. I’d need to learn as well, but he’d get us started.

Rescue or Breeder?
Knowing that we wanted a puppy helped us determine whether to search for a dog from a rescue or to look into breeders. We quickly noticed that finding a puppy as a rescue was rare, not to mention if you have a particular breed in mind. He really wanted a lab again, I was okay with that. The alternative was a husky, that I said was absolutely a no because of the extra shedding factor. I like labs too. Savy had been a chocolate lab. We decided to focus on the Labrador Retriever breed in our search.

Once we decided on a breed, and that we’d find a puppy from a breeder and not a rescue, as well as who among us was going to do most of the traing, we were well on our way! This part took lots of conversations though, many times through tears grieving about Savy. I’d be sitting across from my husband binge watching episodes of Grey’s Anatomy and later Scandal to distract myself. I’d pause the screen on the ipad I was watching on and say how much I missed her. He’d pause his show on the TV and say he missed her too. This at night time was especially hard because it’s when she’d typically lay between his feet at the end of the couch. We agreed we needed another dog soon to feel normal, to function better as a family, and as a couple. We were just better individually and together with a dog. We also knew no dog would ever replace her. He continued to search daily and started sending me texts with links to look at.

More puppy pics and videos? Yes please.
I’d get a little ding during the day on my cell phone from him. I’d click on a link to pictures and sometimes videos of lab puppies. It could immediately turn my day around. This little routine helped remind me that getting a puppy was what I wanted. It helped on the days I really missed Savy. I also loved seeing how my husband was getting excited about it too. Seeing him sad and missing his girl Savy was the opposite. That was horrible. He equated it to feeling like he was missing a limb. Walks he took alone now felt odd. She was always by his side. Getting a puppy, not a replacement for her, was feeling more and more necessary. Up to the top of our priority list she went.

Dam and Sire…AKC what?
Over Memorial Day weekend we visited a farm to see a litter of puppies. This was eight weeks after losing Savy. They were a beautiful red color that I’d never seen before. I learned there were not only black and yellow labs, or chocolate labs like Savy was, but also fox red labs. I loved the color. The breeder had the puppies in the garage in an open pen. I had never seen puppies at this stage of development or visited a breeder at all before. I had nothing to compare it to. She was nice and seemed knowledgeable, and had an AKC (American Kennel Club) sign out front on the lawn. My husband thought that was important before we visited and had done a fair amount of research prior. I immediately fell in love with the puppies. I used Venmo to send a downpayment to the breeder on our drive home. I was sold, and went right to our online calendar on my phone to mark the weekend of the 4th of July that we’d pick up the puppy. We even called my folks to tell them we were getting a puppy! But then about a week or so later my husband had a look on his face. He said he had been sitting on some information he wasn’t sure I wanted to hear. He had looked into the pedigree of the mom (dam) and dad (sire) dogs further and had learned something that concerned him. Without me getting overly detailed, he discovered that the breeder was doing what is called “line breeding.” The mom dog had been bred with her half uncle. This type of breeding is technically not illegal or anything, but can result in an increase in genetic defects. Some of it depends how close of relatives the dogs are. Looking into it more and knowing this troubled us. We had to consider it. Wasn’t no relation in the dogs an obvious better way to go? Of course it was. It’s not like labs are hard to come by. We ended up deciding to ask for our deposit back from this breeder. We just didn’t want to risk it.

American or English?
It was hard going from thinking we were getting a puppy to then not yet getting a puppy. We were also glad we had not actually picked a specific puppy yet. I learned that you typically get a certain order of “pick” depending on what order you put a downpayment down in relation to others. For that litter of puppies we would of had the first pick of a female puppy. We still liked the fox red color, but did consider opening our search up to a yellow lab or chocolate lab too. We also learned that the body structure of labs between whether it’s an American or English lab are quite different. We like the American lab’s more slender build that is similar to what Savy looked like. But knowing what color and even type within the breed narrowed our search even more. Were we being too picky? No. Getting to this point of thinking wasn’t hard. It was just accepting what we wanted and being okay with that. There wasn’t a rush other than we preferred the idea of training a puppy in the summer rather than the dead of winter. We would just have to be patient.

Too much dog?
We called another breeder that was about four hours away. She had some beautiful dogs that checked all the boxes. There were pictures on the website of dogs wearing blue ribbons and details showing how great they were at retrieving while hunting. The only problem was that we weren’t hunters. It was almost one of the first questions this breeder asked. I said that I just wanted a good family dog that would play fetch and bring it back, you know be a “retriever?” That was fine with the breeder of course, but the price of the dog was much higher because of what they were being bred for. Savy had cost around $200.00 back in 2013. The dog from the farm was a $500 down payment and would have been $1000 more at pick up. This dog would be $2,500 total. After we hung up I knew it was just too much dog for us, so we’d continue looking. When I say we, I mean my husband.

Pupdates! 🐾
Around week 16 I stopped counting how long it had been since Savy had died. I knew eventually this would happen. It’s also about when we found another breeder to contact and eventually decided to go with. This brings me up to the present. We have third pick out of four female fox red puppies from a litter of eight. There are four boys and four girls. The pedigree looks fantastic. The breeder sends us weekly “pupdates,” as she calls it, by email. She has color coded collars on each so we can see the different characteristics and personality traits of the puppies. She’s been doing this for a long long time, also lives on a farm, but has them in the house. She just sent a video last Friday of them outside in a fenced in play area for the first time. It looked like a pre-school playground at a daycare. There was a plastic climbing structure with a small slide, things to crawl through and around and behind. There were colorful toys and even an empty plastic water bottle rolling around. I saw one puppy jump at the bottle to see what it would do. It’s clear she is allowing them to explore and learn and grow in a safe environment. We feel good about our choice. The cost is inbetween the first and second breeder we reached out to. It feels a little like the “Goldilocks” story of picking out a puppy, not too much and not too little of the cost or things we have been looking for in our search. We’ll get third pick this time, so we’ll just be choosing between two of the girls. (My boys and husband will be the ones to choose and pick up the puppy. I’ll be in New York City!)

Savy’s little sis 🩷
By this point, we have not only made a list of all the things we’ll need for the puppy, but have also crossed off many of those items. We’ve been collecting them in one main area along the wall of our home office. We’ve moved Savy’s bed from the corner. We did decide though that we’ll reuse one or two of her beds for the puppy at some point. (She had four at one time in various rooms and corners!) They are still fairly newer and in good condition. The puppy will reuse her steel bowls for food and water too, as well as the black leash. It’s a money saving choice, but also a way to keep Savy’s spirit with us. I think of her as this new puppy’s big sister. I got hand-me-downs from my sisters, and this puppy will too. But she is getting a new collar, new toys, a kennel and mat for inside the kennel that are all brand new. My husband found a kennel that can divide in two so it’s smaller when the puppy needs it to be, and then can be adjusted and made bigger as she grows. I love that! So smart. I texted my folks for old bath towels this past week too, and got a whole bag full. We’ll use those for lining the top of her bedding in case she has an accident.

Puppy Go Bag
I bought what is called a “puppy go bag!” I had fun searching online for something to put her things in when we travel, or go out with her for the day. You can spend over $100 on designer and personalized bags. I found this one at about half that cost. It felt a little like getting a diaper bag for a baby.

I love the collapsible food and water bowls and all the pockets for toys. There’s even sturdy zipper bags for food and treats. I just washed those out. I’ll add disposable poop bags, hand sanitizer, and some wipes eventually. I did buy some cute puppy blankets but they arrived much smaller than I thought they’d be! They’re tiny, but I’ll keep them anyway. The tag for her collar required a name, which is a much longer story in how we got to that decision. I’ll leave that for my next post, and end with a couple photos of the puppy go bag!

Have you ever raised a puppy? Any tips? I’d love to hear your story. Leave a comment below.

Make it an adventure!