Quote Originally Posted by wolf_Q View Post
How old will he be when you bring him home? At my work we want the puppies to be 12 weeks and have 2 sets of shots before we will groom them so I'd say that's a good general rule as far as having him around a lot of people/other dogs you don't know as you don't want to risk him getting parvo or other diseases that are serious in puppies. But I'd start socializing him with family and "safe" dogs like Dozer right away. I can't remember the exact age I started leaving my pups alone but they were young...I'd start out with an hour, then 2 hours, etc. I think the general rule is they can hold their bladders for 1 hour for every month old they are. Here's a site I found with great advice for potty training too http://www.michiganhumane.org/site/N...rticle&id=7687

You should definitely enroll him in a puppy kindergarten class I think they do these around 4 months old. These are very important for socialization it helps them get used to new people, new environments, new dogs.
Ryder will be at almost 8 weeks old when we bring him home. I think I will do that - Dozer is "SAFE" as well as Buster and Malley (Mike's brother's Labs). Mike doesn't want me to enroll him through puppy classes, but I'd like to do something at least different this time with a puppy. He's a guy, he thinks we should do everything on his own, including training Ryder. He has a hard time accepting 'help' from others and would rather do it all on his own. We've never done it before with Rosie or Hank. I kind of regret with Hank because he's such a different dog that we've had in our family! I'm not saying he's a bad dog, but he could've learned a couple things that would've encouraged him to be more sociable and less jealous towards people/other dogs.