A Weekday Rota for a Puppy That Survives the School Run

I treated the weekday like a work problem. Write down what cannot move, put one name against every slot, and decide in advance what happens when the train is cancelled.

The puppy does not know the school run has a start time. Your house does. Between waking up and shutting the front door, someone needs the bathroom, someone cannot find a shoe, and the puppy needs to go out. If that slot has no owner, it goes to whoever is already most tired.

I treated this the way I would treat a rota at work: write down what cannot move, then fit everything else around it. The template below has blanks on purpose. Your fixed points are not mine, and no timetable I wrote could be right for every house.

Write down what cannot move

Take a sheet of paper and list the times in a weekday that nobody can change. When people wake up. When the children have to leave. When the adults start work or leave for it. Meals and bedtime. Then add the ones people forget: the lift to a club, the day the bins go out, the call that starts the working day.

These are the posts the rota hangs from. The puppy's needs go in the gaps between them. Do this before you decide anything about him, because the day is the part you cannot negotiate with.

One name in every box

Under each fixed point, write what the puppy needs at that point and put one name beside it. One name. "The kids" and "us" are not names, and a job with two people on it often ends up with neither. Copy this onto paper and fill in the blanks:

Waking: first toilet trip ____ / breakfast ____
School run: who takes the children ____ / who stays with him ____ / where he is meanwhile ____
Working hours: who is home ____ / who checks in ____ / where he rests ____
After school: who is back first ____ / toilet trip ____
Evening meal: who has him while the table is laid ____
Last trip before bed ____
Night: who gets up ____

The children's names go beside routine jobs, with an adult in the room: filling the water bowl, or carrying the poo bags on the walk. Anything with risk in it carries an adult's name, such as a gate left open or a puppy loose near a small child. When the adult on the rota has to be in the shower or on a call, write down which gate or crate does the supervising.

For the school-run window, name one adult as the puppy's adult and take them off shoes, bags and lunches. The window is short and crowded, and he needs one person who is doing nothing else.

Read it aloud before he arrives

Once the blanks are filled, read the rota aloud at the table as if it were a real day. Start at waking and go slot by slot. Where two people say "me", cross one name out. Where nobody speaks, you have found the slot that will fail. Ask each child to read their own lines back, so they hear what they own.

Do this a few days before he comes home, while changing the paper costs nothing.

Write the night off into the grid

Look down the finished rota and find the person who has done the most. Give them a night off this week, with a name against it for whoever covers. Do the same for a morning. It goes on the paper as a line, not as a favour that has to be asked for, because the person who has done the most is usually the last to ask.

The day the rota breaks

A train is cancelled, a child wakes up ill, or an adult is stuck at work. It will happen, so decide now what happens then.

Write a backup name beside every slot you can: a neighbour or a relative who has met the puppy and knows your words. On a broken day, cut down to what has to happen: toilet trips, meals, a safe place to rest, and an adult watching whenever he is loose. Everything else waits until tomorrow. Whoever is ill comes off the rota. They do not stay on it by default.

Restart the next morning

A broken day is not a verdict on the rota. After the evening meal, put the paper on the table, find the slot that failed and change that one slot. Give it to someone else, move it to a different time, or add a backup. Then start again in the morning. If the same slot breaks three days running, the slot is wrong, not the person who keeps missing it.

Stick the rota on the fridge where everyone passes it, and give it ten minutes every Sunday evening. Keep what worked, change one thing, and write the date at the bottom.

Free help

The free pack The first day he is yours takes the first forty-eight hours hour by hour, so you can see where your own blanks fall: mohamedabukhadra.com/help/first-week. My book After You Say Yes to the Dog has a manual for the first week and one for the first three months, both built around a family rota.

Related: Time Off for a New Puppy: Who Is Home in Weeks One to Three · Why Weekends Are Harder Than Weekdays With a New Puppy

I am a father, not a trainer, a vet or a behaviourist. This is what worked in my house. Anything that touches safety, check with a professional who can see your dog and your home.