by Team WellJoy
Are you even a Pet Loyalist if you haven’t uttered these words: my pet is my baby.
But what happens when you have a human baby? How do you introduce a new family member to your pet? And how do you explain to the cat or dog at the center of your world that they might have to share the spotlight with someone else?
Grace Heckman, Senior Associate Brand Manager at World’s Best Cat Litter, is in the middle of charting that path. Pet Loyalist to a pair of (“gorgeous, high energy, precious”) Vizslas, Case and Kinze, she’s also about to welcome twins.
Lifelong pet love
Grace and Case have spent the last ten years together. Originally he was her husband Alex’s dog, but after a job change Case moved to Iowa to join Grace for her senior year of college – and yes, he did go to bars with her.
Kinze was a later addition, joining the family in 2020 right after Grace and Alex got married, moved into a new house, and started doing a top-to-bottom renovation. “We decided to just do it all together at the same time,” she jokes.
Now, as they get ready for the next chapter, with two entirely new family members, Grace says she’s had to think about what that adjustment means for everyone – especially Kinze, who she describes as a classic codependent pandemic dog.
“I don’t want them to feel as though they have less value, or I can give them less. I want them to feel like they have the same loving home they had before, there’s just additional people there.”
New smells, new routines
The first part of making it all work, according to Grace, is understanding and accepting that there will be a lot of change, and you will inevitably have less time.
Step two is helping your pets to adapt to those changes plenty in advance. For Grace that’s meant gently introducing Case and Kinze to new boundaries that will make life easier for her as a new parent, and safer for the twin babies when they arrive.
“Vizlas are super high energy,” she explains. “They love to jump. They love to play. They want to rough house with you. Kinze used to always lay on me, and now she has to lay next to me. She has to learn she can’t step on me anymore, or jump on me, because there’s a chance in the future that I’ll have a baby in my arms.”
Part of this has been getting both dogs used to a new house layout. Grace’s home office is now the nursery, and Case and Kinze have had the chance to sniff the new furniture and take in the different setup. Grace has also started using baby lotion on herself, so there’s less new smells for Case and Kinze to encounter once the babies are born.
Perhaps hardest (for everyone) was letting the dogs know they’re no longer allowed in bed.
“They didn’t love that,” says Grace, “and so we compromised by staying up a bit later with them. Now they’re used to having a little time where we decompress at the end of the day with them, and then go to bed.”
Plan for what's next
It’s not just about these small, gradual shifts in routine and behavior. Grace says her and her partner have spent a lot of time planning for how things will work once the twins arrive (including enlisting family and friends to help with those all-important, high-energy vizsla walks).
As soon as the babies are born, they’ll send back baby blankets from the hospital – “because dogs get everything they learn about from scent”. Grace has asked family to take care of Case and Kinze for a couple of days after the twins are born, and plans to introduce the babies – at a safe, higher level – once the dogs have been returned and had their joyful reunion alone with their Pet Loyalists.
“It’s a big change,” she says. “They’re very used to me being their main person but I’ll be honest, I’m probably not going to be able to do very much with the two of them at once if one baby is crying and the other one needs a diaper change.”
“We’ve had a lot of discussion around having more stress from taking care of the children, but also making sure the dogs don’t feel completely left out of the family. It’s a tricky balance.”
It's human behavior, too
It’s not just their own routines and ways of doing things that need to shift. Grace is already planning for what happens as the twins grow up and sticky little hands meet tempting fluffy tails and ears and whiskers…
“The dogs have to have their own comfort space,” she says. “I’m never going to let a kid crawl into their kennel, because that’s their space. I’ll never let the dogs approach a child unsupervised. There has to be respect.
“They’re beautiful creatures that we love and trust and hold very dear, but they’re still an animal at the end of the day, so you have to balance that. They don’t know better. They don’t have the ability to think through logic. You are responsible for making sure the dog is in a position where your kid is okay.”
For more advice on introducing babies and young children to your pets, read our WellJoy guide.
