If you are about to bring home a puppy for the first time and have no idea what to do, you are at the right place. Recently my husband and I brought home the light of our lives, our puppy, Bailey and we had no clue how we were going to handle him. For months before we brought our puppy home, I scoured the internet. I read blog after blog, looked at hundreds of products, read thousands of reviews and made a million mental notes. Trust me, no amount of research and preparation can seem enough to brace you for this day. You are going to have to take it by the minute. However, in today’s post, I’m gonna mention a few things that could help handle those minutes.
It all boils down to the essentials when you are bringing your puppy home. On his very first day with you, he would need the following.
1.) A collar
If you are anything like me, you have obsessed over the size, color, quality and a million other things even while looking for the very first collar. Trust me, it is simple. You will need to know the neck diameter of the puppy you are bringing home, to get the perfect collar. Ask the breeder or the shelter to give you the neck diameter and it should help you buy the collar. It is also easy to just drive to a pet store and buy a collar right after you pick your puppy up.
2.) A leash
We started with a retractable leash because it was easy to let the puppy run ahead of us if he needed to. It worked fine when we wanted to stop him or keep him close to us. We switched to a regular rope leash when Bailey reached about 3 months of age because we started training and our trainer wouldn’t accept retractable leashes. Bailey had no problem with the transition and neither did we, but I would recommend using a regular leash from the beginning if you don’t want the hassle of re-training your puppy.
3.) Puppy Food
When we brought Bailey home, we were given a small bag of puppy food that he was already eating, to take home. It gave us the time to purchase more of the same food for him within the next few days. It is recommended that you introduce new food to a puppy over a span of three days, by adding a little bit of the new food to the old food every day and increasing the percentage of new food in the bowl each day. We didn’t switch Bailey over to new food until he was 3 months old.
4.) Food & Water Bowls
This is purely based on preference. We got a food and water bowl set with a silicone mat on Amazon. Both products still works great for us.
5.) A few toys
Any squeaky toy, a ball, a plush toy or a Kong would work. Puppies love to chew and might chew things around the house as well. I would suggest you puppy-proof your house before bringing the puppy home. If you have already brought your puppy home, try to keep all wires and anything that you don’t want destroyed, unreachable to the puppy.
6.) A chew stick
I give Bailey Dingo Dental Sticks and he absolutely loves them. I have given him these since the day we brought him home and they are his favorite. I just jam one into his Kong and it keeps him busy for a while. He can’t get it all out at once, so that way I can control how much he consumes at a time. Also, I only give him one chew stick per day. I ended up buying the large Kong and it was quite big for Bailey, but he enjoyed it anyway. Plus, he will grow into it real soon.
7.) Treats
Most dogs are extremely food motivated so it is a good idea to have some treats handy right from the first day. Zukes Mini Naturals Dog Treats worked great for us. We got the chicken flavor and Bailey loved it. The only thing to note with these treats is to keep the bag sealed at all times as the treats dry out and could become unappealing to the puppy if dried out. There are tons of other treats to use. I will do a full post on them later.
8.) A fluffy blanket/A dog bed
Puppies sleep a lot and if you are not sure of what kind of bed you want to get your puppy yet, you could set up a temporary bed with a fluffy blanket. Not all puppies like to snuggle inside blankets but most love to lie on them. Bailey is a golden retriever so he never liked a blanket on him, but he loves sleeping on the blanket because it is soft and comfortable. The blanket was his bed until we got him a proper dog bed.
9.) A crate with a bed
We used a crate to train Bailey to sleep through the night. We got the Amazon Basics crate with a MidWest pet bed to use inside it. The crate comes with a divider, so we set it to the appropriate size for the puppy, leaving just enough room for the puppy to lie down and turn if needed. This is to ensure the puppy doesn’t pee or poop inside. I will do a full post on crate training later.
10.) Puppy pads
We learnt about puppy training pads from someone else and bought some on Amazon for Bailey, but he never really used them. For the first two weeks after he came home with us, we would try to get him to use the training pads sometimes in the middle of the night. He would sniff the training pad and pee right near it, but never on it. We ended up using our training pads for absorbing the pee off the floor after he was done. We ended up training him not to pee inside at all because of this. We still have a ton of unused pads, so unless you really intend to have your dog pee inside certain times of the day, I wouldn’t buy these.
Make sure you have all or most of these and you are good to go. I will do more detailed posts about the different products we used and how they worked for us later. If you have any questions about your big day, feel free to post a comment or contact me and I would love to help. 🙂
