The first fortnight: what actually happens when your puppy comes home
Less exciting than you imagine and more tiring than you expect. What the first two weeks really look like.
The first fortnight is the part nobody photographs. It is also the part that sets the tone for the next fifteen years, and almost all of it comes down to doing less than you feel like doing.
Days one to three: keep the world small
Your puppy has just lost their litter, their mother and every smell they know. The instinct is to introduce them to everyone. Resist it. One or two rooms, the people who live there, and a great deal of sleep — a puppy this age needs eighteen to twenty hours of it, and a sleep-deprived puppy behaves exactly like a sleep-deprived toddler.
Put the crate beside your bed for the first few nights. It is the crate they travelled in and slept in here, and the blanket in it smells like their siblings. Being able to hear you turns the first night from a crisis into an inconvenience.
Toileting, without the drama
Out on waking, out after eating, out after play, out every hour or so in between, and out one last time before bed. Go with them, wait, and make a mild fuss when it happens. Accidents inside are a note to yourself about timing, never a matter for the puppy.
Start the grooming habit now
This is the one piece of first-fortnight advice specific to a poodle, and it is the one most often skipped. Your puppy’s coat is soft and easy today and will change at around eight months into something that mats if you look away.
Sixty seconds a day, every day: brush, comb through to the skin on one small area, handle the feet, look in the ears, touch the muzzle, then stop while it is still boring. A puppy who thinks grooming is unremarkable becomes a dog the groomer is pleased to see.
Socialisation is quality, not quantity
The window that matters closes at about sixteen weeks, which creates an understandable panic to expose a puppy to everything at once. What builds a confident adult is not volume, it is the puppy choosing to approach and finding it fine. Sit on a bench near a café. Watch a skateboard from thirty metres. Let them decide.
One good experience the puppy chose beats ten they endured.
Week two: a shape appears
Somewhere around day ten most families report the same thing — the puppy stops being a visitor. Sleep consolidates, the toileting misses drop away, and a personality arrives that was not there in week one.
That is also when the questions start, which is what we are here for. Our families have our number, and there is no such thing as one too many messages in the first month.
