Harley's 11 Week Update

Saturday marked three weeks since bringing Harley home. Which also marks three weeks since I have had a solid night sleep! Since bringing Harley home, we were a bit reluctant on starting the crate training. He had been introduced to the crate, it sits in our living room/kitchen for him to walk in freely. We started out with keeping him in there for very short periods of time and slowly started to increase the length of time. The longest he has stayed in there is two hours. Daniel and I both work full time so we are gone from the house 8-9 hours a day, Monday to Friday. While some people have said it would be fine to leave him in a crate for this long, I feel differently about it. In my eyes, he is still a baby. Holding his bladder for that long is not possible at 11 weeks old and I don’t agree with letting him soil his crate as it defeats the purpose. So where does he stay you ask? We decided to leave him in our en-suite bathroom. We put a baby gate up so that he can’t wander into our room and laid out news paper and pee pads on one side of the bathroom and on the other side is his bed, toys, water and food. He has become very comfortable in this space and leaving him for such a long period of time gives us comfort knowing he is okay. However, when we bring him downstairs for free time, we have him only explore the kitchen area so that we don’t have accidents in the living room. Since we have been reluctant on the crate training for sleeping, he also stays in our bathroom at night. Before you say, so how is he learning to control his bladder? He's just figuring it out I guess..we have had a few pee pee accidents in the kitchen but nothing major. We take him outside after any activity (sleeping, eating, drinking, playing) he has started to get the hang of it. We make sure we reward him when ‘releasing’ outside. We do have to constantly watch him whenever he isn’t sleeping which has also made it very difficult to do anything around the house. Which is why we have now started with crate training for short periods of time, so that I was able to get back to some sort of normality for myself.

The one thing I find even more difficult than potty training is the CONSTANT nipping/biting at my feet, ankles, calves. I will say wearing socks is a MUST! I have even had to start wearing old bootie style slippers to cover and protect me from his razor sharp teeth. That is definitely something I cannot wait for him to grow out of. I also feel like a broken record saying NO! a million times a day. It is hard to not lose your patience at times but then you have to remember he is just a puppy, they all do it. If anyone knows a special way to stop puppies from doing this, please let me know!

He has gone for a few walks although we don’t go very far. The first time I took him on a walk, he kept stopping and looking at me and I swear it was like he was saying ‘why in the hell are you keeping me constrained like this!’ He is doing pretty well but he definitely needs to be taken for walks regularly to get used to it.

Harley out on his first walk. (picture is quite blurry as I had to zoom on my Iphone quite a bit but you get the point)

Since Daniel plans on being in town for a while, we decided starting him in puppy training classes would be a good idea. (More of like new puppy parents training so we know what we are doing) We have enrolled him in the PetsMart 6 week puppy training course and start on March 12th, I am so excited! We are also taking him for his first puppy bath this Saturday, I hope he does okay and doesn't get too freaked out by the whole process.

A few more recent pictures of Harley!

Rachel xo