Poodle intelligence with Cocker eagerness. He will learn as fast as you can teach cleanly, which is why sloppy reps cost more than no reps.
Moderate-high. The morning tank and the need for real outlets are breed-typical, not a Truffle quirk.
Breed-consistent and confirmed by his own record: tug, then the chin scratch, then food, and food only as a game.
Cockapoos bond hard and are over-represented in separation anxiety cases. This is why the micro-absence programme is not optional enrichment, it is breed-indicated prevention, and why it starts now, not when a problem appears.
Floppy, haired ear canals trap moisture and wax. A weekly 30 second ear look-and-sniff from now, plus ear-touch banked in handling sessions, prevents both the infections and the ear-handling fights at the vet.
Low-shed means the coat holds everything and mats fast from around 6 months. Daily 10-stroke brush habituation now, while it is easy, buys a lifetime of calm grooming. This is the single most commonly skipped Cockapoo task.
Nothing to do at 9 weeks beyond knowing it: reputable-breeder lines are usually tested, worth confirming with Claire's paperwork before the 24 July vet visit.
The weight chart carries the breed growth band. On-band is calm, off-band for two consecutive readings is a vet conversation.
Every threshold in this app, the weight band, the attachment programme, the ear and coat routines, is parameterised from this profile, then corrected by Truffle's own logged baseline.
Nothing currently urgent. On watch:
Regurgitation after vigorous play. Once, 15 July, small and watery after intense tug. Managed by the intensity cap. A second occurrence goes on the list for the vet visit on the 24th.
Weight trajectory. 2.6kg on the 10th, 2.9kg on the 14th, healthy climb, log weekly and the chart watches the trend.
Overnight holds. Now at seven hours, computed live on the dashboard from the potty log. Sudden shortening after this level is establishing is worth noting.
Vet: Medivet Lewisham, 159-161 Lee High Road, SE13 5PF, 020 8318 1020. Insurance: Agria Lifetime Plus. Next visit: 24 July, second Nobivac DHP.
Three different states wear the same bitey costume, and each needs a different answer. Reading which one you are in is the single most useful skill in this whole guide.
1. The Morning Tank, first hour after real waking. Full battery after a long sleep, often turbocharged by the post-poop energy burst. Digging, shredding, nipping, all drive, no malfunction. Answer: a legitimate outlet, the destruction box, the snuffle hunt, then tug. Never suppression. Exception: if the waking is at 4 or 5am, it is still night, needs are met and the party is refused entirely, the outlet waits for morning proper.
2. Play biting, through the day. Loose wiggly body, mouthy, pauses when something better appears. Answer: redirect to the tug or a chew, boringly, identically, every time. Hands leave the game the instant teeth arrive.
3. Overtired frenzy, roughly 8:30 to 10pm. Frantic, escalating, hard mouth, and the tell: redirection makes it worse, he comes back harder. Answer: removal, never redirection. Calm into the pen with a chew, lights low, zero interaction. Prevention is the wake-window rhythm, run honestly all day.
The diagnostic shortcut: check the clock, then check what redirection does. Morning plus responds-to-outlet is the tank. Daytime plus responds-to-swap is play. Evening plus redirection-backfires is overtired.
A nine-week-old needs eighteen to twenty hours of sleep a day and cannot self-regulate to get it. Left to choose, he chooses stimulation until the crash.
The rhythm: roughly 45 to 60 minutes awake, then rest, enforced if needed, all day. The dashboard tracker does the remembering: tap at every waking and every settle. Amber means wind down now.
Signals lie at this age, the clock does not. Apparent energy at minute 70 is not spare capacity, it is cortisol, the crash already boarding. Trust the clock over the performance.
Every completed nap is a withdrawal from the evening meltdown fund. A day of honest windows usually ends with a pup asleep before the witching hour opens.
Two days of data on a velcro-attachment breed is nothing, the realistic curve is measured in weeks, and it is measured in latency and intensity, not presence. The question is never does he still whine, it is how fast does he quieten and how loud was it.
Morning protest costs him nothing, full tank. Evening protest is expensive, depleted tank. A quiet evening and a loud morning is not regression, it is arousal economics.
One method correction: the return celebration, yes, approach, good boy, petting, is a party, and parties at reunion can teach the chain whine, quiet, human returns with fireworks. Keep returning only during quiet, but flatten the arrival: quiet mark, brief scratch, walk on.
Log every deliberate absence with a fuss score, 0 silent to 3 full protest. The trend line falls over two weeks even while single mornings feel like same-old. Trust the line, not the morning.
Ranked from the evidence so far, strongest first:
1. Tug and movement. His hardest drive, discovered 15 July. Doubles as impulse-control training via pause-and-release. Office hours only: midday placement, never after 8:30pm, and never at 4am.
2. Shredding and digging. Confirmed the hard way on the grass patch. Now legitimised through the morning destruction box. A drive this strong is a resource once it has a legal address.
3. Chin and jaw scratch with held eye contact. The social currency behind every Sit rep. Free, unlimited, works everywhere including through the pen bars at bedtime.
4. Food, but only as play. Kibble in a bowl bores him. The same kibble scattered, hunted or earned is eaten readily, every meal since the method settled. Chicken stays the high-value reserve.
Non-currency: excitement. Big voices and big energy do not reward him, they dysregulate him. Calm is the delivery mechanism for everything above.
The xylitol check comes first: any peanut butter in this house must be 100% xylitol-free, it is lethal to dogs in small amounts. Read the label, then read it again on every new jar.
Half a teaspoon each of plain natural yogurt and clean peanut butter is at the sensible ceiling already, extras stay under roughly 10% of daily calories, and at his size that is a very small number. Do not increase it, repurpose it: smeared on a lick mat and frozen, the same calories become the occupier ritual that buys your showers and cooking.
Rotation, one new food at a time with a two-day gap, watching stools: plain cooked chicken, kibble soaked and frozen in a Kong, a fingertip of plain pumpkin puree, a sliver of banana.
Never: grapes or raisins, onion or garlic, chocolate, anything sweetened, cooked bones.
Direct evidence from this morning, worth taking seriously rather than treating as a one-off: Sit worked cleanly, twice, while he was still inside the pen shortly after breakfast, calm marker, chin scratch, both landed. Minutes later, loose in the open room during the same wake window, fully hyperactive, running circles and nipping at feet, Sit got zero response, not once, despite identical technique.
That is not inconsistency in him, it is a real, usable pattern: containment itself appears to lower his arousal ceiling enough to make him trainable, independent of the clock. A wake-window timer alone cannot see this, only logged outcomes tagged with context can, which is exactly why every training attempt now records whether he was contained or loose at the time.
The practical instruction this produces: during the post-waking hyperactive stretch, before he has had a chance to properly wind down, run any active cue work while he is still in or right at the pen, not after releasing him into open space. Once he is loose and circling, redirect to a physical outlet instead, the destruction box, a shred toy, tug if the window allows it, rather than attempting commands that are very unlikely to land until the arousal genuinely drops.
The app now learns his personal hyperactive-window length directly from logged Stuck, too wired outcomes rather than assuming a fixed number for every dog. Check the Live Narrative in Field Notes for his current learned figure, it will sharpen as more mornings get logged.
A direct answer to a question worth settling properly rather than leaving implicit: which skills need the pen, which need open space, and why, based on what has actually been logged, not assumption.
Pen or contained space: Sit, all handling and ladder work (ears, paws, brush, nails), and the earliest Settle-on-the-mat reps. These all require a lowered arousal ceiling to land at all, and containment itself appears to provide that independent of the clock, proven directly this week. Any rep in these categories attempted during his learned hyper-window defaults to contained context from here forward.
Pen first, then deliberately graduated outward: Leave It. The early staged reps belong in the pen, same reasoning as Sit. The whole point of the later phases, open hand, then an unstaged real-world drop, is to deliberately leave that safety net, because an unstaged open-space success is the version that actually matters day to day. This is the one skill where the pen is a starting point, not a destination.
Needs open space, do not move to the pen: Tug, Give and Release, Recall. Tug works specifically because it gives arousal somewhere to go, containing it defeats the exercise. Recall needs real distance to mean anything, a pen has none. Forcing either into the pen would quietly break the skill it's meant to build.
On the pen's current contents: the soft toy, the banana squeaky, and the two tugs stay. This was tested directly, not assumed, Sit succeeded with all of them present. What made the difference was containment itself, not a barer floor. No further stripping is indicated by anything logged so far.
Kibble was never going to work here, and pushing harder on food was the wrong lever the whole time. For a dog whose currencies rank tug and attention far above anything edible, Leave It has to be rebuilt around what he actually wants, using the same principle any trainer would apply to a toy-driven dog: the reward for ignoring the boring thing is the exciting thing arriving immediately, not a treat from the other hand.
The setup: tug rope tucked out of sight before you start, never visible during the leave-it moment itself. Present a genuinely neutral item, a spoon, a sock, anything with zero pull for him, not a treat of any value, since food-value grading does not apply to a dog who ignores kibble outright.
The physical problem worth naming directly: what stops him pouncing on a placed item before you can react. A closed fist already solves this, there is nothing to reach. An open hand or a freely placed item does not, and waiting on marker timing alone is too slow for a dog this impulsive. The fix is a physical intermediate step: keep a flat hand hovering just above or resting lightly over the item, not gripping it, simply blocking the path, so a lunge meets your hand rather than the item. Only once he reliably backs off from that covered version does the item get placed fully in the open with your hand withdrawn.
The reward mechanics: the instant he disengages, even a flicker of looking away, produce the tug immediately and start a short, genuinely exciting game. This is Premack's principle in practice, using the behaviour he already wants to do as payment for the behaviour that's harder for him. Fade the immediacy over time, first every rep, then intermittently, backed by calm praise and chin scratch, with an occasional big tug jackpot saved for the hardest reps.
If he does get to the item despite the block: never wrestle it away, that turns grabbing into a game of keep-away, which is its own reward and actively undoes the exercise. Calmly trade for the tug instead, same as any other exchange, and reset the rep rather than treating the miss as something to correct.
He waits patiently while a bowl is lowered, then explodes the instant it touches the floor. That is not a lack of self-control, it's that floor-contact has quietly become his own self-taught release cue, nobody ever told him to wait for a word, so the bowl landing has been doing that job by accident.
Fix one, decouple the floor from the outcome. Lower the bowl an inch, pause. Calm, lower further. Any lunge, the bowl retreats immediately, no words, no correction, it simply goes back up. He learns directly from the object itself: lunging makes it go away, stillness brings it closer. A few days of this and the old rule, floor contact equals go, stops being true.
Fix two, and the actual long-term answer: give him a real release word. Okay, or free, said calmly the instant you let go of the bowl once it's down. This moves the trigger from a physical event, which he will always react to, onto a verbal cue you control, and it's the version that eventually generalises well beyond mealtimes, doorways, curbs, anywhere a genuine wait matters more than a held breath.
Apply the same logic anywhere else an object reaching the ground has become his trigger, not only bowls. Any placed item is a candidate for the same incremental-lowering-plus-release-word treatment if the same explosive pattern shows up.
A cue is not learned when he does it while you hold a treat, it is learned when the word alone moves his body, cold. Testing too early teaches him the word is background noise, so probes are gated.
The gate: roughly 40 clean pairings, logged, spread across at least four days, with sleep between them, puppies consolidate learning during sleep, which is why the nap rhythm is also training infrastructure.
The probe: one calm mid-window moment, low distraction. Say the word once, softly. Count three seconds in silence. Never repeat the word. Bottom hits the floor within three seconds: mark it a pass. Three passes out of five probes across a day: acquired, move to the next phase.
A failed probe costs nothing if you do not repeat the cue. Just log it, bank ten more pairings, probe again in two days. The Skills ledger counts pairings and unlocks the probe for you.
The rule of thumb at his age is about 50ml per kilogram per day, so roughly 145 to 175ml at his current 2.9kg, and more in heat or after hard play. The app's dashboard computes his current target from his latest logged weight.
Meal-time-only watering is too restrictive. The rhythm instead: water available through every wake window, actively offered after naps and after play, lifted about an hour before bed, gently, and honestly optional given his seven hour overnight hold.
Pace the post-play drinking: smaller amounts more often beats one huge gulping session, which swallows air along with water.
A full day of genuinely low intake in this heat is a same-day vet call, not a wait-and-see.
He chose the bare plastic grate as a bed on day two, a cool firm surface in July heat, and that vote decides the setup: the grate stays as the base, the original tray stays out serving the grass patch, and nothing gets reshuffled. Predictability outranks tinkering.
Fleece is retired for summer, he told you it was too hot. The one sanctioned addition: a thin cotton towel over half the grate, so every night he chooses cool-bare or soft-covered, and every morning you read his answer.
The selling programme: one meal a day scattered in the crate, door open. Voluntary entries captured with a quiet yes and a tossed kibble. The door does not close in this chapter, entering stays his idea until the idea is fully his.
His adjusting and shifting at night is settlement, not rejection: new position, warm nights. The 10:20pm to 4:10am stretch says the crate is winning.
Showers, cooking, cleaning, your own toilet breaks: none of these require a tethered or held dog, and forced stillness on a lead teaches frustration, not calm. The system has three parts.
1. The pen is the babysitter. Every hands-busy task happens with him penned, with something to do. That is what confinement training is for, and it is a kindness, not a confinement.
2. Your tasks live inside his naps. He sleeps 18 plus hours a day. The Now engine flags nap windows as your task slots: shower in nap one, cook in the long midday sleep. Most of your day is already hands-free once the rhythm runs.
3. The occupier ritual for awake absences. A frozen lick mat or soaked-kibble Kong is handed over as you walk away, every time. Your departure starts predicting something good arriving. Never tether him to furniture and walk away, it is a genuine strangulation risk at this age.
Teaching him to do nothing is a real skill, it is Settle on the ledger, and it is built through the mat over weeks. It is never built through restraint.
Two different clearances, often confused:
Indoors: open now. Supervised exploration of the flat can start immediately, one puppy-proofed room at a time, after a toilet trip, inside a wake window. This fortnight is prime socialisation, every texture and sightline banked now is lifelong confidence.
Outdoors, ground contact: 31 July. Second vaccination plus clearance. Carried outings, paws never touching ground, begin then too, and the banked bell-to-door protocol goes live the same day.
The expedition rules: proof the room twice, pee first, he leads and you follow, ten to fifteen minutes, end before he wants to. One room is a feast, the whole flat is a flood.
Two days of calm-only-gets-attention work and it still breaks the moment you're out of sight is not a failed method, it is a method being asked to close too large a gap in one jump. Fully visible and calm, then fully invisible in the kitchen, skips every step in between.
Work the edge of visibility first. One foot past the doorway, still half in view, is the real next rung, not the kitchen. Return before any protest starts, not after. Only once that is boring does the gap widen further.
Hand over the occupier before you move, every time, frozen lick mat or a stuffed Kong, so the departure predicts something good rather than nothing.
Clear loose objects from the pen during distress. Thrashing against the fence and moving things around is frustration finding fuel. An empty, boring pen has less to escalate with, and that alone often shortens the outburst.
Measure it properly. Not does he still whine, but how fast does he quieten and how loud was it, logged as a fuss score each time. On a velcro-attachment breed this curve is weeks, not days, and it is normal for mornings to look worse than evenings, full tank versus empty one.
Tug, Give and Release, and Recall all correctly live outside the pen, containing them would fight the exercise rather than help it. But open space also removes the one advantage that's been doing real work indoors, containment lowering his ceiling, so open-space time needs its own light structure rather than being treated as unsupervised free-for-all.
Before it starts: a quick physical-space check, same as any indoor room, nothing chewable at floor level, nothing breakable within reach, exits accounted for. Open space multiplies the consequences of anything missed in a sweep.
During it: hands leave the game the instant teeth arrive, the same rule that already governs every tug session, applied consistently whether the space is a pen or a whole room. If mouthing escalates rather than settling with a redirect, that's the signal to end the session, not push through it.
Ending it: the same principle as every expedition and every tug session this month, stop while he's still keen, not after he's already lost interest or gotten overtired. An open-space session that runs until he crashes teaches the opposite lesson from one that ends on a high note.
If he gets genuinely overstimulated mid-session, that's not a sign open space failed, it's the same overtired-window logic that governs everything else, calm removal back to a smaller, quieter space, chew in, lights lower, no negotiation, exactly the protocol already proven indoors.
The full bell-to-door protocol, ring means the gate opens and outside happens, is written and waiting. It cannot start before 31 July.
Until then the bell is furniture near the patch. Sniffed or ignored, both correct. The only job is familiarity before meaning.
Starting early builds a chain that gets retrained the moment the real world enters. Patience halves the total work.
Sleep-debt trend, training success by skill, his real weight curve.
One tap composes his full clinical picture: weights, stool history, the vomit event, holds, feeding, and the six questions worth asking. Show the screen or copy it in.
One tap composes a real training and behaviour reference: skills at working level, socialisation completed, how long he genuinely holds alone, containment safety status. Built from his actual logs, not a template.