E1: Our truth about puppyhood

Listen to episode 1. Available wherever you listen to your podcasts.

Bruce walked into a pet store looking for a Rottweiler and came out with Judge, a Pomeranian, having paid more than double what he'd planned to spend. Ben bought a crate five times too big, put Bowie in it the first night, heard what he describes as a human-like scream, and ended up with his head inside the crate until Bowie fell asleep. Makenzie arrived with strong opinions about her own toilet schedule that turned out, mostly, to be right.

In all three households, the puppy we had pictured and the dog that actually arrived were not quite the same animal.

This is a conversation about what those first weeks actually asked of us, before we had words for any of it.

Bruce's version runs the fullest arc. He'd wanted a Rottweiler, ended up negotiating a price for a dog he hadn't planned to buy, and told himself he had the reading done and a plan in place for the weeks ahead. But then Tatiana touched the glass of the pen where a tiny Pomeranian slept curled up in his own food bowl, and the plan was gone before Bruce had even finished paying for him. The careful, well-researched plan he did have met three sleepless weeks anyway: Judge crying through the first nights, out to the yard twice before dawn, days when nothing about a puppy who looked calm on the surface matched what Bruce and Tatiana were living underneath it.

The conversation moves through what a structured routine can actually do for a young dog, and what it cannot. Through Ben's first night with Bowie, the scream, and the month it took before the crate finally felt safe. Through Makenzie's own timetable, stubborn and mostly correct, and what it cost to enforce ours over hers instead.

None of us had expected how quickly we'd stop being the ones with the plan.