Well not quite the world, but a new experience – the outdoors! This week saw the pups venture outdoors, first a small pen on our decking, so they were not over whelmed, and a nice bowl of lunch to give them something to reward the experience. Outdoors brings a whole new range of stimuli essential for good socialisation, noise, changes in weather and of course new surfaces. Then after a few days the pen was extended, more toys were added and so the fun started, with them running up and down. Indoor socialisation continues with the sounds CD when I leave house to walk adults they get 90 mins of sound effects from fireworks to screaming babies and everything between, plus general kitchen/household noises. They are all getting well versed in online video conferences too.
Then onto new humans, personally don’t allow visitors to the pups until they are 4 weeks old, this is a general rule – to reduce risk of disease and stress at a vulnerable time, plus to ensure the mum doesn’t get stressed, not that Halla would in truth be bothered, but its just to be safe. But once they reach 4 weeks then their prospective families are of course keen to meet them, and at least now visitors are allowed outside as long as keep required distance and I don’t make cups of tea/coffee etc. So with sensible precautions the pups had visitors, and thoroughly enjoyed the extra attention. In addition the neighbours grandchildren visited through a hole in the garden fence – so pups got to experience a smaller size of human, including excited 3 year old. Not generally having young kids around the house – its great to be able to expose them to smaller humans, to help prepare them for all eventualities once they leave home.
Each few days they have a little brushing session – and of course weekly I keep up with the nail trimming. They are now tucking into four slightly softened meals a day, plus of course ongoing access to Halla, though she is more delighted to see their food bowl than them these days, given they have teeth!
One thing I will tempt fate on is how clean these pups are since they have been going outside for just one week – there have only been three poos in the indoor pen (yes that includes nights), and one of them was because I was on a work call and could not react. They are like robots as soon as they go out side they do their business, long may it continue.
Ok so tried to get some 4 week photos – they were pretty tired so look bit grumpy as I woke half of them up for these ! Plus given the pups have such lovely dark eyes (as breed standard asks) the definition is just not there with my phone camera, definitely need a better photographer !
