This is our story on how we got Sunny (our golden retriver puppy) and our mishaps during the first weeks together.
We agreed to get a golden retriever during our first year of dating, but as it so often happens, life had it’s own plans.
Our situation was never easy or simple. He was living in Andorra, I was living in Barcelona. None of us wanted to move our lives so we were only spending the weekends together. Then covid happened and we got separated for 3.5 months. Our relationship was in a bad shape and we were struggling to make it work.
After the lockdown was lifted we were spending alternating weeks in each other’s countries working long distance. After a few months we were exhausted and at the end I decided to give up my life in Barcelona to move in with him in Andorra. We signed the official lifepartner papers a fee months later and were planning to buy a flat… just as the prices were on a sharp rise! Our plan was to get a golden for our birthdays (we have birthdays at the same time!) after we moved to a bigger flat. When it became obvious that our move won’t be so easy we were devastated (as all our future plans were depending on this move).
After talking with a few experienced dog owners (and our landlord) we decided to go ahead with the puppy project independently of our living situation (it’s not so bad after all…). One of our friends had a beautiful and calm young golden and she gave us a contact for the breeder. When we called them the waiting list for a puppy was 1.5 years…
I couldn’t believe that we can be so unlucky! Somehow nothing seemed to go our way. On the other hand I’m not a person who gives up easily. Our next best option: Google! I searched and researched all of the breeders that were relatively close to us and I found one that looked really promising! It was a breeder close to Pamiers (France), only 2 hours of drive from our place. After contacting them via email we found out that the price was 1.5x higher than that of the breeder previously recommended to us… After some consideration we decided to go with the more expensive breeder as they seemed really serious about the health of their dogs and in the long run it’s better for the dogs and the pawrents as well to have a physically and mentally healthy dog.
We only had to wait 3 months, but our next challenge came from covid once again: we could not visit the farm or our puppy. We were heartbroken when we received this news as a video call can never replace an in person meeting especially in the case of a puppy. Luckily we did receive a few photos and some videos before our Skype call to select the pup. We had booked a male and we were second in line to choose out of the 3 male pups.
There was one puppy that caught our eye since the very beginning: it was mr. Green. We always said with my partner that the looks don’t matter, we would like a calm puppy. It turns out that the calmer brother out of them was mr. Grey and he was the one chosen before us. According to the breeder mr. Green and mr. Blue had similar temperaments, so the choice was clear.
You can see Sunny’s introduction video here:
After two more weeks of waiting the day finally arrived to pick up the puppy! It was a horrible day, snowfall, uncharacteristically huge traffic (on saturday mornings usually people arrive to Andorra, not leave… at the end we were 15 minutes late to our appointment, but luckily Sunny was the last pup to leave, so the breeder didn’t mind and she did spend some extra time with us explaining everything and giving us a ton of advice. We met Sunny’s mom and dad and even his grandfather! It was a lovely place, exactly like it was portrayed during the video calls (phew!).
After months of preparing and watching an infinite amount of youtube videos my expectations were a little bit different from reality. See, in the videos on youtube almost everyone had a lovely drive home with the pup sleeping on their lap (I mean in the passanger seat, not sleeping on the drivers lap!), but in our case, Sunny was nervously moving, not able to relax until I decided to put him down next to my feet (and I had to block access to go under the seat because he was trying so hard to hide!). He did not accept any treats or toys from us and we were terrified that he will randomly pee (after all he’s an 8 weeks old puppy and we knew that at least for the last hour before the trip he did not releave himself) Our drive was at least fairly short, in about 2.5 hours we were home.
We brought him home on the 12th of March which is a Saturday and we had our first vet appointment for the 15th (14th is a national holiday in Andorra). On this appointment the vet told us that they cannot accept the first round of shots he received at the breeder as he was younger than 2 months and we have to come back in one week to restart his vaccination program.
This meant to have the poor puppy (and poor us) confined in our small flat until he was over 3 and half months old!! The next 6 weeks were one of the hardest period of our lives often feeling a tiny bit of regret to get a puppy in the first place. We were stressed out and overtired, our life was ruled by a crazy puppy who couldn’t be left home alone, with only one purpose in his life: destroy everything in his way!
Of course even in these weeks we had a few good moments (mostly when Sunny was sleeping). He is an incredibly cute puppy after all!
Some of the issues we had with him that we were not expecting: not wanting to eat (kibble / processed dog foods), barking a lot (from puppies this young we expected maybe some whining, but definitely not full blown high-pitched ear piercing barking), not wanting to sleep (we were told that puppies in his age sleep 18-20 hours a day), not wanting to be cuddled / be on our lap (he was constantly attacking us and biting us if we tried to cuddle with him), peeing in his bed (after he used his doggy toilett without issues for 3 days), being a full blown demon after 7pm (okay, with a little research we found out this is quite common and known as the ‘witching hour’ for puppies) etc…
Apart from this of course we also had more common issues that are to be expected with puppies (like trying to chew everything, stealing of shoes, begging for food etc.)
Luckily we are now over these extremely hard first few weeks (I feel no one talks about puppy blues enough) and with all vaccines and a strict schedule for eating, sleeping and playing our lives are finally normalizing and getting back on track again. Naturally we have new challenges ahead of us (for example how to get him to stop being the vacume cleaner of our neighbourhood streets or to figure out how to travel together etc) 😅
So new puppy owners: just hang in there, it will slowly get better.
Hope for new puppy owners – stories
Moments with Sunny 