Our puppy Maple turned 9 weeks old this past Friday. I recently wrote about preparing for her arrival and the first 6 days home with her. That was week 7-8. There’s a picture below from that week.
Catch up here:
Puppy Go Bag: Preparing for a puppy after losing our family dog
Puppy First Days Home: Meet Maple!
Maple, 8 weeks old, fox red, female Labrador Retriever.
Yes, puppies bite everything.
The main take away from the week is puppies put everything in their mouths and want to bite everything, all the time. My husband is calling it “bite inhibition.” He’s been learning a lot and sharing it with me. Basically, we’re having to work with her constantly to bite less hard. I say less hard because it’s impossible at this stage to get her to stop biting completely.
I observed my husband working on this the other night. Maple was siting between his legs on a towel on the floor. She kept jumping up to either lick “kiss” him or try and nip at his face, or hands, or toes, or even between his legs! Yikes. He quickly would redirect her and say “ouch” loudly, or “no biting.” If she kept doing it, he’d either say it louder or kinda get right in her face and use a firmer tone. This he explained is similar to how her mom or liter mates might react. Without them around it’s our job to teach her when she’s being too rough or biting too hard.
Maple would pause or stop biting for a bit, but then usually start right up again. It’s a process, and will take lots of practice and patience and repetition. She did at one point start to bite really, really gently and he said “better.” It was cute. She seemed to want to please him and also like she just couldn’t help herself. Also, super cute, the little razor toothed raptor.
Cute Puppy Story: stalking arborvitaes
We’ve been taking Maple out pretty much every hour and within minutes or at least 10-15 minutes after eating. Oh, also every time she wakes up from sleeping. This equals a lot of times throughout the day.
I noticed this past week that she loves the five little arborvitae trees I planted this past spring. They are only about a foot and a half tall, and she loves them! I know this because she’ll run right to them most of the times I take her out. She does this funny little slow motion walk like she’s sneaking up on one. She’ll lean forward, pull her left paw up under herself and point with her body in that direction. I remember hearing that this is a hunting instinct. We had seen from her pedigree history that she has some really good hunting dogs in her bloodline. Not that we’ll use this because we are not a hunting family, but it’s super cool to observe and darn cute! What puzzles me is how she’ll do it again, even if she knows she discovered last time that the trees don’t move.
Funny Puppy Story: warning, contains mention of poop
Depending how you read this story, you may not think this is funny at all. But the morning it happened I was in the “make it an adventure” mood and thought it was. Here’s how it went…
I was typing at my dining room table in the early morning with some coffee. This is my daily routine lately. My husband had just let Maple out to go pee. She had been fed as well. We usually wait just a bit to let her out again so she can go poop. He was transitioning to either quick going upstairs or to move her play pen to the office, I can’t remember. But either way he wanted me to keep an eye on her for a couple of minutes. She ran around the dining room table and was on the far end from me. I saw her start to squat and then I hurried over to her to quickly pick her up.
This is where it gets hilarious. I flipped her upwards so her tummy was towards the ceiling to try to prevent the poop from coming out. I don’t know exactly what I was thinking. Well, I really wasn’t thinking. It was just my instinct really. Either way, the poop started coming out! It looked like I was pressing a Play-Doh tool down to make a snake. “Oh, no! It’s coming out!” I said. I tipped her slightly towards me while moving into the kitchen in the direction of the patio door. My husband was in the kitchen by the sink. I was laughing, he wasn’t. He wasn’t sure how to help, but I could feel his energy shift. A piece of poop fell backwards onto my workout shirt next, and then smudged my left arm before falling to the floor. I laughed louder. It kept coming out a bit more and I tilted her towards the floor as it dropped. Better than the carpet I thought. Success! Still laughing, I somehow transferred her over to my husband’s arms. He took her “outside” as we reminded her our word for pee and pooping in our backyard.
I knew I could just get a fresh shirt. I went to the bathroom to grab some toilet paper for the poop first. I took care of that, flushing it down. I grabbed a Clorox wipe to clean up the spot on the floor. Then I washed my hands and arm at the kitchen sink, and went upstairs for a fresh shirt. When I first became a mom, and had similar moments like this, I always thought there should be a little badge I could give myself. Over the years, I’ve instead imagined myself getting one. I congratulated myself for prioritizing what I should do first and next in an order that worked. Swiftly taking care of it before they were even back inside, it was like it hadn’t even happened. I imagined myself sticking a badge on my right side of my chest. “Nicely done Annie,” I thought. It wasn’t even 6:30am yet. I noted the whole few minutes as something to write about, and felt thankful for it all.
Do you have a funny puppy story? Please share! Leave a comment below.