The First Week With Your New Puppy: What to Expect

Everything on your shopping list is bought, the bed is in the corner, and the puppy is in your arms on the way home from Birati. Now what? We hand over puppies every week and take the phone calls that follow, so this is the honest account of what the first seven days look like — including the second night, which is the one nobody warns you about.

If you have not yet bought the basics, our new puppy checklist has the list. This post is about what happens once the puppy is through the door.

Before you leave the breeder

Three things to take with you, and we hand over all three:

1. The vaccination and deworming card, with dates and batch numbers. Your vet will want it on the first visit.
2. The name of the food the puppy has been eating, and how much. Keep it unchanged for two weeks. Our guide to feeding an eight-week-old puppy explains why.
3. A towel or cloth that smells of the litter. Ask for one. It goes in the bed and does more for the first night than anything you can buy.

Day one: arriving home

Keep it quiet. This is the day relatives want to come and see the puppy, and it is the worst day for it. The puppy has lost its mother, its brothers and sisters and every smell it knows, all at once. Let it explore one or two rooms on its own terms, show it the water bowl and the place you want it to toilet, and then let it sleep. It will sleep a lot — eighteen to twenty hours a day is normal at eight weeks — and that sleep is how it copes.

Carry it to the toilet spot the moment you arrive, after every meal, after every nap and every twenty to thirty minutes while it is awake. House-training starts in the first hour, not in week two. Praise warmly when it goes in the right place; say nothing when it does not, and clean up with a proper enzymatic cleaner rather than phenyl, which smells enough like urine to invite a repeat.

The first night

Put the bed beside yours. Not in the kitchen, not on the balcony, not in a separate room with the door shut. A puppy that has slept in a pile of siblings every night of its life will cry when left alone, and the fastest way to stop the crying — for good, not just tonight — is to let it hear you breathing for the first two weeks. You can move the bed further away a metre at a time once it is settled.

In the bed: the towel from the litter, a hot water bottle wrapped in cloth (warm, not hot), and if you have one, a ticking clock or a phone playing quiet, steady sound. Expect to be woken once or twice for a toilet trip. Carry the puppy out, let it go, carry it straight back, no play. It learns quickly that night is for sleeping.

The second night is worse

Almost everyone finds the second night harder than the first. On day one the puppy was exhausted and overwhelmed. On day two it has worked out that the litter is not coming back, and it says so. This is normal and it passes. Hold your nerve, keep the routine identical, and do not bring the puppy into your bed to stop the noise unless you are happy for it to sleep there for the next fifteen years.

Days two to four: routine, and the vet

Set the day up the same way each day. Puppies thrive on sameness, and a fixed pattern of meals, toilet trips, short play and long sleeps is what makes house-training work.

A rough shape for an eight-week-old:

• Wake, toilet, breakfast, toilet, short play, sleep
• Mid-morning: toilet, play or gentle handling, sleep
• Midday meal, toilet, sleep
• Afternoon: toilet, play, sleep
• Evening meal by about seven, toilet, calm time, last toilet trip, bed

Four meals a day at this age, at fixed times, and the bowl picked up after twenty minutes. What goes in on a schedule comes out on a schedule.

Book the vet visit for day three to five. Take the card. The vet will confirm the puppy is healthy, set the date for the next vaccination and deworming, and tell you what is normal for the breed. This is not optional even for a puppy that looks perfect, and it establishes the relationship you will need the first time something goes wrong at nine on a Sunday night.

What is normal, and what is not

Normal in week one:

• a few accidents a day, slowly reducing
• sleeping most of the day
• a slightly reduced appetite for the first day or two
• one or two soft motions as the stress settles
• biting hands and ankles in play — teething starts soon, and our teething guide covers how to redirect it
• hiccups, twitching in sleep, and the occasional yelp at nothing

Not normal — call the vet the same day:

• watery diarrhoea, or any blood in the stool
• vomiting more than once
• refusing two meals in a row
• a puppy that is dull, will not play and does not want to be picked up
• coughing, laboured breathing or discharge from eyes or nose
• a swollen, hard belly

An eight-week-old puppy has no reserves. The gap between “a bit off colour” and seriously ill can be a day. Do not wait to see.

Visitors, children and the other pets

Keep the first week quiet. One or two visitors a day at most, sitting on the floor, letting the puppy come to them. Children should be taught the two rules before the puppy arrives: we do not pick the puppy up without an adult, and we leave it alone when it is in its bed. A puppy that learns its bed is a safe place is a puppy that can always be settled.

If there is a cat or an older dog, let them meet through a door or a gate first, then on a lead, for short periods, always supervised. Give the older animal its own space and its usual attention. Most introductions go well when nobody forces them.

What not to do in week one

• No walks on the road or in the park. The vaccination course is not complete, and parvo is in Kolkata soil year-round. Our post on when a puppy can go outside has the timings. The terrace or garden is fine.
• No bath. Wipe paws. Bathe in week two or three, on a warm afternoon.
• No change of food. Not even to something better.
• No punishment for accidents. The puppy does not connect a raised voice with a puddle it made three minutes ago. It connects it with you.
• No leaving the puppy alone for hours. Build up from a few minutes.

By day seven

Most puppies are sleeping through most of the night, going to the toilet in the right place more often than not, eating with enthusiasm and following you from room to room. They know their bed, they know roughly when meals come, and they have started to learn their name. That is the whole job of week one. Everything else — proper training, socialisation, walks — is for the weeks after the vaccinations are done.

If anything in the first week worries you, call us. We mean that: every puppy leaves here with our number, and the questions that feel silly at midnight are the ones we would rather answer than have you wait on.