The Unfiltered Reality of Raising a Baby and a Puppy at the Same Time

I was sitting flat on the cold kitchen linoleum at three in the morning, nursing a highly irritable four-month-old on my left side, while a ten-week-old golden retriever mix actively tried to swallow the fuzzy pom-pom off my right slipper. The baby was crying because she was tired, the dog was whining because he had just peed on the only clean rug left in the house, and I was crying because I had voluntarily signed up for this circus. I’m just gonna be real with you—adding a baby puppy to a house that already has a human baby in it's an exercise in absolute, unhinged chaos.

My oldest daughter is my ultimate cautionary tale here. When she was just starting to crawl, my husband and I caught a bad case of the Instagram fuzzies and decided it was the perfect time to get a family dog. We had this grand, cinematic vision of them napping together in sunbeams and growing up as inseparable best friends. Bless our naive little hearts. Nobody tells you that bringing home a furry newborn is exactly like bringing home a human newborn, except this one has razor-sharp teeth and can run faster than you.

I actually had to create a separate hidden spreadsheet category just called "baby p" so my husband wouldn't immediately panic when he saw how much money I was throwing at enzyme cleaners and chew toys those first few months. Because y'all, this season of life is not for the weak, and it's certainly not cheap.

That romantic delusion of them growing up as best friends

The first few days actually trick you into a false sense of security. You bring this soft, sleepy little potato home, and for about forty-eight hours, everyone is just staring at each other in awe. Your baby points at the dog, the dog sniffs the baby's toes, and you take a hundred pictures thinking you've absolutely nailed this whole motherhood thing.

Then the dog wakes up. Literally and metaphorically. Suddenly you realize you've brought a feral predator into a home where your baby frequently drops Cheerios, leaves pacifiers on the floor, and smells heavily of milk. You spend your entire day running interference between a crawling infant who wants to pull the dog’s tail and a highly energetic animal who thinks the baby is a hairless littermate that needs to be wrestled.

My mom tried to warn me, telling me I was borrowing trouble, and for once in my life, I should have just listened to her. You basically have to rethink the entire geography of your house, throwing up heavy-duty gates in every doorway and moving anything you care about above waist height just to make sure nobody gets accidentally bitten or swallowed.

Poison control but make it canine

Before the dog, my biggest fear was my baby finding a stray penny on the carpet. After the dog, my brain turned into a constant, swirling encyclopedia of toxic foods and deadly hazards. It turns out that a staggering amount of normal human stuff can actually send a dog to the emergency vet.

My vet, who's an absolute saint and deserves a medal for dealing with my panicked phone calls, casually mentioned one day that things like grapes, raisins, onions, and chocolate are highly toxic to dogs, which sent me into a complete spiral because my toddler was basically composed of 80% raisins at that point. She also mentioned something about xylitol in peanut butter causing liver failure, which I only half understood through my sleep deprivation, but it was enough to make me aggressively read the back of every single jar in my pantry like I was studying for the bar exam.

You find yourself obsessively vacuuming not just for your crawling baby’s sake, but because the puppy will eat literal drywall if you let him. We ended up keeping the baby’s high chair in a completely gated-off dining area just so I didn't have to tackle a dog to the ground every time a rogue piece of garlic bread fell off the tray.

What my vet seriously said about the medical stuff

I thought we could just take the puppy on long walks to exhaust him so he'd leave the baby alone, but apparently, that's not how it works at all. My vet looked at me with deep pity and explained that puppies can't even go to public parks or walk around the neighborhood safely until they've had their full round of shots, which takes forever.

From what I gathered in my exhausted state, there are all these terrifying diseases like Parvovirus just living in the dirt waiting for your unvaccinated dog, so we were trapped in our own backyard for what felt like years. And the worms! I don't want to gross you out, but the vet said worms can jump from dogs to kids, which was enough to make me basically bathe the dog in preventative medication and bleach my hands fifty times a day.

I'll say this: skip the fancy dog clothes and put your money into a good veterinary insurance plan the second you get the animal. I learned that the hard way when our pup decided to eat an entire tube of diaper cream and we had to pay for an emergency stomach pump at midnight.

The great teething war of our living room

There's a specific ring of hell reserved for the months when your baby is cutting their first teeth at the exact same time your puppy is losing their needle teeth. The sheer amount of drool in my house was enough to float a canoe.

This is where things get really weird, because you've to draw a very hard line between baby toys and dog toys, and neither party respects that line. The puppy thinks the baby's Sophie giraffe is a premium chew toy, and the baby desperately wants to gnaw on the dog's crusty nylon bone.

I finally got smart and started buying silicone teethers for the baby that I could easily wash the second the dog inevitably stole them. The Panda Teether Silicone Chew Toy ended up being our holy grail during this phase. I bought it because it has all these different textures that my baby honestly liked chewing on, and the little handle made it easy for her to grip when she was miserable and fussy. It’s food-grade silicone, which is great, but honestly, my favorite part was that when the dog would inevitably snatch it off the playmat, I could just throw it directly into the top rack of the dishwasher on sanitize mode and hand it right back to the baby an hour later.

Why keeping nice things is an extreme sport

If you're an aesthetic parent who loves a perfectly curated, neutral nursery, I've some terrible news for you. Puppies don't care about your organic linen aesthetic. They only care about digging in the mud and tracking it directly onto your child.

Between the baby spitting up and the dog jumping on her with dirty paws, I was doing four loads of laundry a day. I quickly abandoned all the complicated outfits with eighty buttons and just started keeping her in the Organic Cotton Baby Bodysuit. It's ridiculously soft, but more importantly, it has an envelope shoulder design so when the dog knocks over a cup of coffee onto the baby (yes, that happened), you can pull the whole messy outfit down over her feet instead of dragging it over her head. It held up to constant hot-water washing without shrinking into a weird square shape, which is all I ask of infant clothing at this point.

Check out our full line of easy-wash, mess-friendly organic baby clothes that can survive your chaotic household.

Sleep schedules that make absolutely no sense

Just when you get the baby sleeping through the night, the puppy will start crying in his crate at 4 AM because his bladder is the size of a walnut.

My vet told me that puppies really need to sleep something like 16 to 18 hours a day, which completely blew my mind because whenever my puppy was awake, he was moving at the speed of light and terrorizing the cat. But just like an overtired toddler, an overtired puppy turns into a biting, manic terror. We had to enforce strict nap times for the dog just like we did for the baby.

Crate training is non-negotiable when you've kids. Period. I don't care if you think it looks sad. You need a safe, enclosed space where the dog can go to escape the screaming baby, and where you can put the dog when you need to change a blowout diaper without a wet nose suddenly appearing in the danger zone.

As for potty training, I'm just going to rant for a second because regular carpet cleaners are a complete scam. If your dog pees on the floor, you've to buy a specific enzymatic cleaner that chemically destroys the pee molecules, otherwise the dog will just keep peeing in that exact same spot until the end of time. I bought it by the gallon. My house smelled like strong citrus and desperation for six solid months.

The toys that work (and the ones that don't)

You really have to rethink your baby gear when there's a puppy in the mix. Anything on the floor is fair game to them.

I absolutely love the Wooden Baby Gym we got from Kianao—it's gorgeous, made of sustainable wood, and the little hanging elephant is so sweet for a baby’s visual development. But I'm just gonna be totally honest with y'all: if you've a jumping breed like a retriever or a lab, you can't leave this out in the open living room. My dog thought the hanging toys were his personal sparring partners and tried to tackle the whole wooden frame. We ended up moving it into the nursery and putting a very sturdy baby gate in the doorway so my daughter could enjoy her tummy time in peace without a furry giant trampling her.

Eventually, the dog gets bigger, the baby starts walking, and they really do become the best friends you hoped they would be. They learn how to play together, the dog learns to clean up the food the toddler throws on the floor, and you finally get to sit down for five minutes.

It's exhausting, it's messy, and it'll test your marriage, but watching your toddler sneak pieces of cheese to their furry partner in crime makes all those sleepless, pee-soaked nights fade into the background. Almost.

Before you dive headfirst into the madness of raising kids and dogs, make sure you're stocked up on the essentials. Shop our durable, easy-to-clean baby toys here.

Messy Truths: Your Puppy & Baby FAQs