First week with Bonnie

Bonnie has arrived! And boy is she cute 🙂

I’m not sure what to say about her so far.

She has been interesting.

She settled in really well with us pretty much from day one. She sleeps well overnight, with 1 pee break. She wakes up at a reasonable time.

She’s insanely chill. I do not remember Betsy being this chill. She self settles quite often and just seems pretty low key most of the time. She occasionaly gets a little crazy and bitey like all puppies do, but I’d say her baseline is chilled out.

I had thought I’d have a strict training schedule of 3 times per day but I’m realizing now that’s not really working for me. So I just sprinkle it in randomly whenever I’m in the mood. A bit of body handling practice here, a bit of sit command training there, a bit of getting used to the shower… just whatever I’m in the mood for. She’s already picking things up really well, she sits, lays down, and comes when called. She seems fairly relaxed about having her paws handled & nails trimmed. She’s been here for 7 days and had two pee accidents in the house but overall doing really great.

She’s great in her crate.

She’s great with the kids.

She generally seems happy with us!

But there’s some stuff I’m a bit worried about.

• She seems kind of nervous of a lot of things & people. She didn’t like the vet when we visited and I don’t think it was a great experience for her.
• We just had some visitors over, and similar, I don’t think she liked it much.
• In both cases, after a bit of interaction where she seemed uncomfortable, she found a quiet place to curl up where they wouldn’t bother her (under the chair at the vet, under the coffee table at home with the visitors) and fell asleep until they were gone.
• I don’t remember Betsy being this sensitive, she seemed more open to social interactions at the same age.
• I am a bit worried about it! I want her to have positive experiences but I’m struggling to manufacture things to be perfectly positive. We haven’t had a ton of interactions with others yet but we have had a couple. In these situations I want to set it up so it all goes well. But there’s always moments where things don’t go perfect like clockwork; I intervene but it always feels like I should have prevented the uncomfortable situation for her a bit sooner. So! I don’t feel like she’s had a lot of purely positive experiences meeting people as a result, and this really worries me already!
• I remember agonizing over Betsy’s early socialization as well and having similar anxieties about it… But also Betsy seemed far less easily put off by/nervous of people, so this seems… worse.

So that’s where we’re at. She’s chill, settled in with us well, really lovely sweetheart… who seems a bit nervous of strangers and I’m worried about her turning into an anxious-aggressive dog already at 9 weeks old. I don’t know if this is warranted or not and hopefully I’m just being overly neurotic.

We’re starting puppy class next week so I look forward to seeing how that goes and chatting with the trainer there as well.