Sheerah's 2020 Puppies ~ 3 Weeks Old

Welcome to week 3!  As you can see from their photos, the puppies are more alert and awake than the last 2 weeks.  Mobility is also on the rise!  Though it’s tottery, the puppies can now walk.  Below is Luna showing you that she can walk as she sniffs the grass for the first time.

As you can see, the puppies had their first foray outdoors this week.  They got a brief introduction to grass, a distant lawn mower sound, our cat, and all the smells on the pleasant summer breeze.  ​Walking means it’s potty training time.  See below how we now have a designated potty area for the puppies.  The potty area is the right of their box where the newspaper is. 

We believe house training begins as soon as the puppies are mobile at 2-3 weeks old.  (You can read more about our house training process here and here.)  We use the Misty Method to train our puppies.  The premise of the Misty Method is to capitalize on a dog’s God-given instinct not to soil the place where they sleep.  The puppies now have two areas – a sleeping area in the gray box with a towel and potty area on newspaper in a plexi-glass box.  They cannot yet access the rest of the whelping area.  We change the towel in the sleeping area several times a day to teach them it’s a clean area and transfer sleeping puppies from the potty box to the sleeping area.  (Yes, the puppies do sack out in there at first, but my children are good at catching them and moving them.)  When the puppies do eliminate in the potty box, we cover it with fresh newspaper to keep it clean while preserving the smell to make them come back again.  We also eliminate the smell in the sleeping area by cleaning it with Bio-base Biodeodizer, which works naturally to eliminate the source of bad odors by using viable bacterial cultures (read more here), and it smells amazing!  This is hands-down my hubby's favorite Life's Abundance product because, yes, puppies do make messes; and, yes, they are quite smelly at times.  Spraying on biodeodizer immediately makes the odors begin to dissipate.
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Luna demonstrates a big development milestone the puppies achieved this week - being able to sit! (While Midnight in the background appears to be snoring in his sleep :)

​The puppies’ weights as of this week are Luna - 2lbs, 6oz; Midnight - 2lbs, 5oz; Hiro - 2lbs, 4oz, and
​Bella - 1lb, 14oz.  These four puppies are full and content and growing very well.
 
Since the puppies can now see and hear, they are already being socialized to the normal household sights, smells, sounds, and sensations.  They are in a room off our kitchen and near our washing machine.  They already are familiar with a myriad of household occurrences – doors closing, washing machine running, coffee pot brewing and beeping, happy voices (and grumpy voices), hands touching them, soft surfaces, hard surfaces, cool surfaces, radios, a blender, and on and on – and all of this without any real purposeful socialization on my part because they are part of our daily routine.  As they grow, I intentionally socialize them to as many things as I can, while being conscious not to overwhelm or overstimulate them.  We always, always let them get plenty of rest because that's an important part of puppy growth and development.
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I’ll close my post today with snapshots from the week.  As you can probably guess, the cuddle sessions are getting longer!

​Thanks, as always, for stopping by!