Diary of a new owner

by Keith Williams

Keith and Lewi

Am I speaking too soon? Fingers crossed! He seems to be settling quite well. After the first half hour or so, he has been OK. He seems to live like my son drives - flat out or fast asleep, nothing between.

I have had a few visitors today, my neighbour, who has been as impatient as me, and my son and daughter in law. I noticed that it took shorter and shorter times to get over the shyness, so that by the time my daughter in law arrived, it only took about 2 minutes for him to take his toys across to her.

I fed him at 4 and he wolfed it down, so I gave him some more of the dry food that I had mixed in, which he seemed to really enjoy. I took the bowl away after about 15 minutes, as per instructions, but he had not left a lot in there. He only ate a very little of the ready brek mix this evening. He is ignoring his bed and sleeping either at my feet or in front of the settee where I normally sit.

I was extremely impressed this evening as a while after I had shut the garden door he came and asked me to go out, I opened up and he went out and immediately did a wee! I made a fuss of him. Later though I made the mistake of ignoring his whines when I was washing up, they got quite loud so I walked out to the hall where he was making the fuss and discovered that he'd had an accident. I am sure he had been asking me to take him outside.

I'm about to put him to bed in his cage, he's had another hectic play, one of his toys is 3 cubes joined by cord, the middle one has a bell and the outside ones have squeakers in. He loves that one, though he does occasionally make himself jump when he bites a squeaky one.

 Day two

He was good as gold all night long. Three little whines as I switched the lights off but I just ignored them and went to bed. I did hear a little tinkling sound at one stage in the night where he had obviously woken up and was playing with his bell toy. I got up just before 7 came down and he was sat in his cage waiting. When I let him out in the garden for his waking up toilet, he went mad on the dew-covered grass.

The only thing is, he really did not fancy his breakfast. I did remember what you'd told me though so didn't worry. I put four little bits of dry food in his puppy kong and introduced him to that, so he had a little bit of nourishment even though he had to work for it - he burns so much energy.