The morning after night 2 with new puppy Scully.

First of all: I’ve never raised a puppy before. I had no idea they howl all night until they get used to not being with their mother. I’ve learnt the hard way. Literally all night. 7+ hours non-stop until we finally called a stop to it by emerging from the bedroom.

Secondly: I’ve absolutely smashed my all-time record for no sleep. I haven’t had any sleep at all for two full nights. So 49, going on 50 hours now.

But let me reassure you, there is no way on Earth I am going to get behind a steering wheel until I manage to get some sleep.

I’ve recently acquired a toy poodle puppy, who we’ve called Scully, to accompany the kitten Mulder who we adopted from PetRescue about a month ago. I’m the cat person in the house, and my wife is the dog person, so we decided one of each would be sensible.

However, neither of us had experience raising a puppy, and we had no idea how much work, how much constant supervision, and how exhausting it would be to get her through the first few weeks of house training and feeling confident and safe without her mother. We’re just over a week into this process and definite progress has been made, but there’s still a big way to go yet.

The result of this need for uninterrupted vigilance is that my wife and I are both taking a lot of time off work, and while we’re at home we have no time to do much else other than monitor Scully, unless we’re both home and one is looking after her. The secondary result is no new Game of Thrones episodes until things settle down to let us squeeze in an hour of TV watching again.

In the meantime, I thought I’d start blogging our experiences raising Scully. I’ve posted a few short notes to my Google+ and Facebook accounts, but realised it might be better to put them here for posterity more under my own control, and link across. To start with I’ll copy some of those posts here… (see next few posts)