Well, maybe that shouldn’t need to be headline news. 🙂

Pao is 52 days old today. Watch this really cute video of him eating kibble from between my fingers and being really careful not to bite me. It must be that “don’t bite the hand that feeds you” thing. He’s well-versed in all sorts of sayings. Good boy!

To make up for it though, he is pulling all the threads out from one of my few favorite shirts while I’m wearing it.

While the Kong toy doesn’t seem to be much help so far in keeping him distracted or in learning stuff (I’m going to try peanut butter later and see if it holds his attention longer), I have started to give him one of these gnawing snacks every day. It’s softer than for a strong adult, and meant for a senior dog, but very helpful. It’s certainly better than him gnawing on the metal railing of his fence. He hasn’t had any bad reactions to it, and it seems to calm him down and really help with his teething.

Pao does have lots of “puppy energy.” Since he’s much better about the puppy toilet now (poo about 100%, pee about 80% with the rest very close, 0% outside his fenced in area or on us) we let him have “running play time” around the first floor. He runs around like crazy, dashes under and out of the stairs, runs to the kitchen, runs to the living room, and basically tires himself out. Which is good for everybody. 🙂

Finally, since Pao was continuing to make good headway in destroying the silver “leisure sheet” we had protecting the flooring, we reformed his cozy corner with new flooring from Nitori that I picked up yesterday. It’s two 45 cm x 180 cm rolls of something vinyl-like laid next to each other and looks sort of like our wooden floor. So far he hasn’t tried to destroy it.

His whining is getting somewhat better. I’m trying to follow the rule that you should not pay attention to whining because it just reinforces it. It’s hard though. I think there must be something encoded in the human genome to respond to a dog whining. Anyway, he’s being better about it today.

Slowly, slowly…

Pao is 44 days old today and he’s lived here for just 12 days. He’s obviously gotten bigger in that time. And his weight has doubled from 1.3 kg to 2.6 kg…

On the gnawing-on-my-hand front, I’m making progress. There seem to be lots of strategies online. The one that works best so far seems to be crying out and having my hand go limp for 10-20 seconds. When that happens, Pao tends to stare at the hand, and lick it. He tends to lick more than bite now. This is apparently a behavior puppies learn when they play with each other, and there is a lot of biting, and sometimes it can get too much.

He can also play a game I taught him. I tell him to choose one of my hands, and he chooses one and then I pet him with it. I’ll have to grab a video of that. It’s cute watching him looking and choosing between two hands even at his age. He can actually select one with his paw.