Where Brooklyn At?

"Where Brooklyn at? Where Brooklyn at?" 'Cause Shio just moved and he's trying to figure out where he's at.

Okay so it's ridiculous to quote Biggie when we moved to downtown Brooklyn... a fairly safe neighborhood with lots of loved dogs. It's been 3 weeks since we moved to our new dwelling and a much longer period of time for anticipating the move. Five months, to be exact. Luckily, we saw that Jenna and Snickers were moving and asked Jenna for some advice on helping Shio adjust to his new home. Coupled with Jenna's and our own techniques, it seems that we've achieved a smooth transition from old home to new home for Shio.

Here's what we did:

1. Labeled our "Open Immediately" boxes clearly. They included our everyday necessities, kitchen spoils, and most importantly, Shio's toys, beds and bowls. We set up his belongings as soon as we finished moving so that he would feel at ease to see familiar items in new surroundings.

2. Found a pet sitter for moving day. It's amazing to me that families will "forget" their pets during the move. How can you forget? Making sure that Shio had a proper sitter the day of was one of our priorities. We have wonderful friends whom live down the block from us and they were happy to watch Shio for the day. And Shio was happy to be with his buddies for the day. And we were happy to have Shio out of the way for the day. Talk about win-win-win.

3. Visited the new neighborhood with Shio before the move. We schlepped to Brooklyn with Shio a couple of times to allow him to sniff and mark his new neighborhood. After we moved, Shio was already familiar with the area and knew how to walk straight to the dog run from our new place!

4. Keep dirty bedsheets. At first, we weren't sure if Jenna was messing with us and wanted us to be the stinky new people on the block (jk), but she gave us some solid advice on keeping our scent on our bedsheets. When we moved, the first thing we unpacked were our sheets and put them on the bed. The first thing Shio did was jump on our bed, sniff around in circles and plop down on the bed. Just to let everyone know, we did wash them as week before we moved so we wouldn't be too dirty.

5. Keep the same routines. 9am potty & breakfast. 5pm potty & dinner. 10pm potty. That's all there is to it!

Hope this was helpful for anyone that's moving.

In the meantime, we're going to keep working on adjusting to our new surroundings.

It's a whole new world out here. :)