Shall We Begin

I think the very beginning was on Friday September 5, 2008. I lost my best friend of 14 years to hemangiosarcoma. It was very sudden and the house was just too quiet. Phoenix used to go with me everywhere. We walked dogs together, he'd be beside me when I worked in the office, he loved going for car rides. After about 3 days I couldn't take the loneliness anymore and I started looking for a golden retriever puppy. My search lead me to a wonderful puppy that I decided to name Oak. I picked him up on thursday September 11, 2008 a cute, tiny 12 lb ball of fluff. Oak had arrived and our journey of learning and laughter and absolute craziness had begun!

The first step was house training. It wasn't too bad. As long as you never left him alone, never stopped watching him, and could tell by the subtle movements(standing, sitting, any movement really :) that it was time to go out, you could get through an hour without an accident in the house! (Like every other 10 wk old puppy!) He wasn't a typical puppy as far as when he had to go. Most puupies need to go out as soon as they eat. The food goes in one end, and out the other! You could not guarantee he would pee or poo right after he ate. In fact, he usually only pood 3x a day. Morning, midday and right before bed. He'd eat, we'd go outside, he'd play, we'd go back inside, he'd pee! It had been so long since I house trained a puppy that I was a bit rusty. The first few weeks were very tiring and very interesting and I wouldn't change it for the world! Finally after we got a bit of a rountine going and he stopped having accidents in the house. Yeah, Success :)

Another important lesson to teach a new puppy is that his crate is his home. It's a great place to sleep and relax when the rest of the family can't play with you. Oak was very easy to crate train. He didn't put up much of a fuss even on the first night. We had to get up at 2am the first few nights to go out and pee, but after that I'd take him out at 11pm every night and he'd sleep until we got up at 5 or 6am.

We had our first visit with our vet on Monday September 15. He was perfect. (As I already knew :) His eyes looked good, his teeth looked good, his skin looked good, he had lovely puppy breath, he passed with flying colours! We also got a stool sample checked and it was perfect as well. We set up an appointment for him to get his final shots in October and off she went(I have a mobile vet, so she came to my house).