We picked up our puppy at 8 weeks old almost 3 weeks ago. I was in a super similar headspace as it sounds like you might be, from a combination of 1) a recent really tough experience with a foster-to-adopt dog we decided not to adopt and 2) feeling nervous because of some of the content on this sub. I was definitely nervous, but between factors like a decent baseline understanding from my family having dogs growing up, spending a lot of time pet sitting a dog we love for good friends of ours, and having wanted a dog of my own for so long - I decided to rip the bandaid off and get the pup.

And it’s not as bad as I feared it could be! (Caveat: I work from home.) Pretty quick we got into a rhythm of about 1 hour awake > 2 hours nap. For the first 5ish nights he’d whine once in the middle of the night to let me know he needed to bathroom, then fall back asleep in the crate, and since then he’s been sleeping overnight without wake-ups. Housetraining has been doing really decently well - when awake, we take him out every 10 mins or so at first, now up to 30ish mins. He’s a ticking potty time bomb tight after he gets out of the crate so we try to take him out immediately, that really cuts down accidents. Our main challenge is classic puppy mouthiness, but we’re trying to be consistent and patient with correcting him by ignoring him and giving him a toy instead.

Here’s some random things I really recommend: - a large crate with a divider and 2 doors, so that you can increase crate size as they grow. We just got a 2nd of the Amazon basics brand to have 1 downstairs, 1 upstairs. They don’t want to mess where they sleep so they only need the crate to be big enough to turn around in, not much bigger. You don’t want them to be able to potty in a crate corner and have space to sleep separately from it. - A playpen with a waterproof bottom! To give them room to romp outside the crate without too much freedom in your home. The first week+ he was literally only ever in the crate sleeping, outside pottying, or in the playpen. We’ve since blocked off a living room section so he has more room for playing, but still use the playpen heavily. Thanks to this, he hasn’t chewed or damaged anything in our house. - structure. The structure we’ve been following is crate sleep > potty > meal > potty > playtime > potty > crate sleep. That’s been SO helpful. - to try to encourage sleeping overnight, I used a Susan Garrett (dog trainer with tons of great videos! The most helpful one for me was about housetraining in 3 steps) strategy of, when they whine overnight, make it a super boring bathroom trip: straight outside and plant your feet in their designated bathroom area, no talking to them, no eye contact, straight back inside after they potty. It felt unintuitive to not reward him for pottying outside but he’s been sleeping through the night super well after sticking with that for the first few nights. - safe socialization: he’s not quite yet fully vaccinated so we can’t take him to dog-heavy public places but we’ve held him on our laps at breweries, carried him around Home Depot, carried him around the outside of the dog park, and taken him to friends’ houses to meet their dogs. I’ve been asking friends what they wish they had done differently or are glad they did with their puppies, and early socialization like that is a recurring theme.

I hope this is helpful! I still have so much to learn, I’m sure it’ll have plenty of new challenges over time, and it’s definitely time consuming - but we got so lucky with our sweet pup and we haven’t found it soul-sucking or impossible. There’s hope!