Welcome home, Nutmeg (Paz Amor and Sofila Spice Girl At High Jump)!
I have been on the look out for an outcross girl to add to our breeding program for a while now, and when I saw this litter born at my friend, Sandi Kubler’s, home I was pretty sure that I wanted one of these girls to be the one. Their dam, Peanut, (Paz Amor I Got Nuttin But Love BCAT) had caught my eye in the show ring when she was just a puppy. I fell in love with her! I knew from Sandi and Peanut’s owner, Diane, that she was as sweet as she was beautiful. And she had been bred to Diane’s Milo (GCH CH Almendares Szara Eminencja) for this lovely litter.
So Friday, 12/27, we drove out to Sofila Havanese in NY to pick up Miss Nutmeg and bring her home! Because she is a lovely, well bred puppy, and has been beautifully raised using Puppy Culture methods, she took the trip home in stride. She slept most of the way, with only a minimum of fussing when we stopped a couple of times. She started to cry more urgently at one point, and we pulled over for her to potty on a pee pad spread in the hatch of the car. She performed right away, then had some lunch and went back to sleep for the rest of the trip!
Anyone who has spent time on this site knows how I raise my litters. And anyone on my FaceBook group has watched me raise my “keeper” pups. But it has been a LONG time (over nine years!) since I brought a pup in from the outside. So I decided that it would be fun, and might be helpful to others, if I were to blog about how I raise a puppy being brought into my home for the first time. This way it will be here on my website where people can refer to it as needed when they get puppies of their own!
So let’s dive right in!
When we arrived home yesterday evening, I put Nutmeg into her pen that I had prepared for her before I left. Here’s a video: I allowed the other dogs to greet her through the pen. If I had seen any sign of her being overwhelmed with that, I would have removed them, but she was all happy wiggles, and they were appropriate with her. Later in the evening, we also let the dogs visit with her in Dave’s lap, for a very brief period.
You have to play these introductions by ear, and you have to know your dogs. I KNOW my dogs are good with puppies, and I knew she had been raised among other dogs. She showed no signs of being worried about them. If she had seemed at all worried or if I had had any concern about my dogs acting appropriately, I would have slowed down introductions.
After eating a good supper of Dr. Harvey’s (which is the same food the breeder was feeding her, and some play time in the kitchen, Nutmeg was ready to crash. So I took her up to bed and popped her into her crate in our bedroom. Now, her breeder had started crate training, but usually sends puppies home at 10 weeks (as I do) Because we had gone out to NY to help her evaluate the litter at 8 weeks, and it is a LONG way, and didn’t want to do it again 2 weeks later, and she knows I am also a Puppy Culture rearer, she agreed to let me take Nutmeg home at 8 weeks. So while Nutmeg had been introduced to, and had been sleeping in open crates at night with her sisters, she had never been shut in a crate over night or been without her littermates. I put the crate on my night stand, right beside my head, and tucked her in with blankets that smelled of her littermates. She went right to sleep. She woke once and needed to potty, and a couple of other times and just whimpered and needed to be comforted to go right back to sleep. She slept right through until 7:00 in the morning!
