Life with Blitzkrieg: "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times." -Charles Dickens (he must have had a puppy)

The title of this blog entry pretty much sums new puppy ownership up. We adopted Blitzkrieg (full name Blitzkrieg Von Kilmeister) on the exact day he turned eight weeks old. That is the earliest possible time you can legally adopt a puppy. He was born on May 12th and we became puppy parents on July 7th. My dear boyfriend, Ben, mentioned time and time again how much work puppies are, but I figured he was being dramatic and trying to scare me. Now, after owning a puppy for over 3 weeks, I think he was understating the situation.

Biggest issues and resolutions:

We began by attempting to crate train our little guy. Everyone swears by it, but we could not take one more night of him screaming and howling in his cage. We tried everything -- including earplugs but our little guy is LOUD. We basically cordoned off a section of our house so that he couldn't get in to too much trouble while we were sleeping. At first, he was good at either going potty on his piddle pads or waking us up to take him out. After a week, he began to regress. He was randomly going potty on the bedroom floor with no warning. He would then be awake ALL NIGHT, barking at the cats or being a giant pain in other ways. It was then that we thought, "let's play with him before bed and keep him engaged instead of letting him sleep." Duh. Now he sleeps through the night almost all the way, only needing to go outside to potty around 5AM.

We also faced the question of, "where do we keep him during the day while we are at work?" We basically locked him in the hallway (we have a nice, roomy hallway). We'd trade off days of who would go home at lunch and check on him and clean up. Twice we tried using a dog gate in lieu of closing one of the doors so he could see out. Twice I came home to the gate knocked down (miraculously, it's NOT easy) and find that puppy had been running throughout the house and causing general chaos. He scratched the paint off the walls, and chewed on the door frames. Clearly this was no longer the solution. Finally this last weekend, Ben made some improvements to our back yard which is now puppy-proof. Since he was quite the little escape artist in the hallway, I was afraid to leave him back there because if he gets out, he gets out. We left him back there last night while we visited at my parents' place, and we came home to a mess (and smell) free home

Those were the two main issues we had as new puppy owners, and it appears we have finally come to resolution on them! Seriously, cats are SO MUCH easier to deal with.