Posts made by basenjired

@elbrant Thank you! Yes, we’re anticipating a LOT of family walks together, haha. By neutral territory I’m assuming you mean somewhere other than our home? Kind of unsure what would be a suitable place...

Hi all! Long time lurker on these forums but first time posting. Apologies if this is the wrong subforum for this sort of thing.

As the title says we just brought home a beautiful baby girl a few days ago and are adapting to our new routine as first-time parents. In the meantime, our 1-year-old female (spayed) Basenji has been at the breeder's frolicking with the other wild Basenjis to give us a bit of space and time to adapt. Pretty soon we will be re-introducing our furry girl to the household, which will have grown one member larger! A few details about our situation:

• Our Basenji has had very limited experience meeting children/babies, as she was brought home just before lockdown and we've had very little contact with anyone since. Just one brief encounter with a friend's infant and young child, which went pretty well.
• We live in a very small apartment in the city, no yard. Our Basenji gets her exercise at the dog park running and wrestling with other dogs 1-2 times a day.
• Our Basenji is, like most, a huge cuddle bug, but also extremely high energy and gets very slappy when she wants to play. I'd say our biggest concern would be if she decides she wants to play with the baby and swats at her to get a reaction.

Some of the standard advice we've heard is to be sure to pay lots of attention to our Basenji to be sure she doesn't feel neglected/jealous, and generally to include her as much as possible in our new day-to-day routine. That said, I would love any advice anyone could offer specific to our rambunctious breed... Thanks so much!