Winnie the puppy

I like challenges. It is only by doing things you're not sure you can handle that you discover what you are truly capable of. I co-founded a company as a result of this philosophy and I've written lots of books about other life changing and rewarding adventures I have had over the years following this sentiment too.

This is the first in a series about my latest adventure - how a puppy changed our family's life. Because in six days she has already changed mine. Just not, perhaps, in the way I imagined.

Isobel and I have both always wanted a whippet and circumstances conspired for us to get one (more on this in a later post). To get ready we devoured books, watched endless YouTube videos and bought a vast amount of stuff – a crate, playpen, various chewy bones, stuffed toys with squeekers, food, treats and even a wifi baby monitor to keep an eye on her when we were asleep but, mostly, our preparation involved defending the decision to get her in the first place when terrified family members queried how the hell we would cope with a puppy as well as everything else. No doubt lamenting the additional help we would imminently be demanding.

"Are you sure?" my Mum said over the breakfast table a few weeks before Winnie arrived in a tone she reserved for my riskier ideas. Isobel's mum was more blunt, bursting into laughter over dinner at the prospect of us actually going through with it a few days before the big day.

Week One

There seems to be a reasonably unanimous take on what you should do with a puppy the first few days after bringing it home - basically cuddle it as much as you can, fill their crate (small confined space that has enough room to lie down and sleep in but is too small to be considered a doggy en-suite) with treats and toys. Spend the day (and the remainder of their lives) rewarding the behaviour you want them to perform with over the top expressions "GOOD GIRL!" and giving them more treats and ignoring them when they bite your ankles. We put Winnie's crate in a playpen with a water bowl and kept the door of the crate open so she could move around and only closed the door to the pen at night or if someone was going out of the front door.

On the basis of our research there seemed to be two schools of thought when it comes to raising puppies - the strict version where you treat them essentially the way baby boomers were advised to raise their human children (be cruel to be kind, make them fit in with your life not the other way around, shout at them to make them listen), or the soft version, which is respectful of modern scientific research (but makes them more likely to devour your neighbour's cat). Isobel and I unspokenly agreed to take our place falling somewhere between the two.

Next we put the blanket we had given the breeder a few weeks before Winnie came (for her and her siblings to sleep on) in her crate to make her feel comfortable in her new home. This is a far more generous act than it sounds because the blanket smells worse than any object I have encountered in the 46 years of my life. You know the smell dogs have that non-dog owners decide unconsciously is so bad it is the only reason they will ever need for never, ever getting a dog? It's the smell of your personal hygiene standards lowering. And because Winnie sleeps on the blanket Winnie smells of it too, which means I now smell of it on account of cuddling her all the time. Smelling awful is one of the ways Winnie has changed my life. Happily she is just the right amount of cute to allow me put up with it. Unfortunately, the smell soon got much worse.

Having a five year old human, a one year old human and an eight-week-old puppy was always going to be tricky logistically, but we managed fine until 8pm on the first day. Isobel was putting Poppy to bed and I was getting ready to put Ted to bed and read him his stories. Winnie was asleep and had so far only been to the toilet outside (because I kept taking her out every hour as recommended and was feeling very smug, privately using phrases like 'natural dog whisperer' to myself about myself). I thought she might be due to wake up while we were upstairs so I closed the door on her pen incase she did, feeling relaxed, and took Ted to bed.

Not long after, I heard Winnie begin to whine but ignored her (as recommended by the books so she doesn't learn whining makes us come running). But the whining soon turned into an angry bark. Ted and I eventually cracked and paused reading his Mr Men books (Christ, they are awful aren't they?) to come downstairs whereupon Ted exclaimed "Errgh, daddy, what's that smell?" while grabbing not only his nose but also his mouth and eyes as if that would help.

It was the smell of two dog turds, one dog wee and one puppy whining at us while running around in two of her own turds and one of her own wees spreading them inside her playpen and on all the toys we had lovingly littered around inside it. Not sure what to do – Winnie was obviously distressed – I opened the gate, grabbing the packet of baby wipes on the chair beside me just in time, and cleaned her feet before she leapt, for a cuddle, onto my lap. Ted, repelled by the smell, had by now taken advantage of my lack of focus to go in the other room and resume watching the Octonauts special on Netflix called, fittingly, The Ring of Fire.

Winnie looked up at me with her absurdly cute 'what, me?' expression and I began the unpleasant task of cleaning up the mess through the door of the pen while she fell asleep on my legs vowing to never, ever, have to do it again as I tried and failed to put the stinking wipes into those dog poo bags that are impossible to open without licking your fingers and rubbing them first.

I spent that night, and the next, and the next, on duty under a duvet on the sofa beside Winnie's pen and leapt out of bed three times in the early hours of the morning when she woke up to take her, grudgingly, out into the garden. The torrential rain made this a challenge but the sight of steam emanating from one of her freshly laid turds as it fell, cushioned, by the freshly mown grass (to make picking turds up easier) and the genuinely thrilled feeling of excitement this pulled out of me as the smell of her excrement hit the back of my throat made me realise one again how much she had changed my life in such a short space of time.

Isobel and I have a rule in our relationship to always say out loud the worst thoughts spinning around our heads in times of stress. We find it's a great way of disabling obsessive thoughts. Once exposed to an audience, they usually disintegrate.

Not this time.

"We've made a terrible mistake" she said over breakfast on day three after a sleepless night with Poppy who was miserably teething. I nodded. "I've been googling 'how do you give back a puppy?'" "I really mean it. This is awful." "I know. I'm so, so sorry. What were we thinking? I've ruined our lives." "I'm not eating. One of us always has to be with her or the children. I don't even have time to do basic self care." "You're right. This is hell. I haven't washed in days." "And we haven't got any clean clothes. I've run out of pants." "So have I."

At that point I got an alert from my phone informing me I had reduced the time I spend using it by 27% in the last seven days. This made me feel better about myself until Winnie whined and I leapt up only to get back down again because I didn't want her to think she was the boss and then got up again as I realised she might need a poo and if I didn't go to her right now she would do it in the house and prove, unquestioningly, that she was.

But then I remembered something else I had read in one of the dog books. Dogs are pack animals and the most important thing is to make sure they know who the boss is. Not being clear on their place actually freaks them out. And the clue is, it's not them. We were falling over ourselves to comply with her needs – reasonably perhaps in her first couple of days – but had now fallen into the trap of letting her call the shots indefinitely. I dashed into the kitchen, knocking over the logs I had jammed on either side of the baby gate we had installed to keep Winnie in one room so she didn't bite the children but because she was so skinny she had crawled through the sides "honey, I've got it. We've got to make her fit into our routine." Isobel had steeled herself by now too.

"Exactly. We're being pathetic. I'm going for a shower" she said, with a tone of thrilled defiance. I felt my confidence grow. "Yeah!" Isobel looked back down the stairs, hope gleaming in her eyes as she contemplated washing her hair for the first time in five days as Poppy stood herself up by pulling on my trousers – and then got back down again and crawled away no doubt because of the smell.

"I've worked out how we're going to do this." Isobel didn't have the energy to voice a reply so I continued. "We're in charge. I'm going to take Winnie out into the garden to go to the toilet now and then I'm putting her in her pen and I'm going leave her on her own so I can read the Guardian. I miss Marina Hyde!"

"Poppy needs a nappy change first" she said, heading back up the stairs.

"Oh. Yeah. Right."