It’s been a year since Lauren and I brought two puppies home.

They’ve gone from being little handfuls with wispy, chirpy barks to full grown rascally dogs with deep, booming, and still mostly chirpy barks. Indiana and Elphaba now weigh 25 and 22 pounds, respectively, and Indy feels husky in comparison. They know how to “sit”, “speak”, “back off”, and “stop biting my ear”.  Elphaba is getting pretty good at playing fetch. They go absolutely bonkers and start jumping and flailing when you offer them a treat, they stand on the arms and back of the couch despite our insistence they shouldn’t, and they don’t like lettuce or dry pasta but eat absolutely everything else that accidentally falls on the kitchen floor.

House training was a challenge for a long time. We took up our rugs a little too late and put them back down a little too early, but most of the time if the dogs had an accident in the house it was because we weren’t paying attention. As they’ve grown up, they can go longer between trips outside and are better at “asking” to go. It took faith early on that such a day would come.

Choosing toys and treats was a learning process before we had a handle on it. Both these dogs are heavy chewers, so plush and rope toys would get destroyed. Then eaten. Durable chew toys are the only ones left standing and now the only ones we buy. Kong and Nylabone are our trusted brands for toys. At first we bought many different kinds of treats. We’ve give them bacon treats, cranberry treats, peanut butter & banana treats, jerky treats, long lasting edible bones, and just about anything else. But to borrow an adage from photography, the best treat is the one you have with you. We buy them in bulk at Costco now along with their dog food and the Costco brand Kirkland is surprisingly the best quality dog food we’ve found.

The best decision we made was getting two puppies instead of just one. Even better, getting a boy and a girl. Being away from the house during the day seems like only a minor inconvenience for the dogs, who are constant companions and play very well together.

Here are some recent pictures:

I am not sure I recommend that everyone should get 8 week old puppies, since they pee on everything and chew up anything and that doesn’t stop for months and months. It can test your sanity and ruin your carpet just like being a parent to a newborn baby can test your patience and ruin your sleep cycles, but I wouldn’t change it for the world.