We always recommend that you feed your puppy as much as it wants to eat since puppies are always growing. We do not encourage measuring of a puppy's food! Please allow your puppy to eat until it is truly full, and do not limit his or her food since your puppy is growing.

We recommend that you place the food bowl down and let puppy eat until it is full. This may take 10 minutes or so. When puppy is full, has wandered away from its bowl, and is no longer interested in eating, then take away the food bowl.

ALWAYS have fresh water available for your puppy. Do not take away the water bowl from your puppy except for two hours before bedtime. (We also suggest that you do not give any more food after this time as well.)

You can feed your puppy three times a day when it is 8 weeks old. When your puppy leaves our home it will be eating three meals a day . However, we often find that puppies sometimes are ready to transition to two meals a day. You will find that your puppy sometimes is not even hungry at lunch when it starts to get older. If this is the case, you can simply feed your puppy twice a day.

When you bring your puppy home, we recommend doing this each day - at breakfast time, place the food bowl down, let puppy eat as much as it wants, and then when puppy is done, perhaps ten minutes later, take the food bowl away. Repeat this at lunch and dinner.

We have no way, as humans, of knowing what day puppy decides to grow a bunch! We do not know what days he or she needs to gobble up some extra food because he or she is growing, growing, growing. As your Havanese grows older it is fine to decrease the amount of food if it is obviously becoming overweight. But do not try to measure or limit food for your puppy. We are simply saying that we do not recommend trying to guess and measure how much food you think your puppy needs each day. Simply put the food bowl down, let puppy decide how much it needs to eat, and then take the remaining food away. This is the safest way to make sure your growing puppy is getting enough food.

Also, remember, do NOT remove or limit your puppy's water. They always need to have fresh water available to keep them healthy! The only time I take water away is 1 to 2 hours before bedtime to help with potty training.

For heartworm I recommend any ivermectin based product. Heartguard Plus is the most common, but Iverhart Plus is the generic and just as good as well.

As for fleas, I really only do the monthly topical treatments if it is absolutely needed, because my dogs don't really go to dog parks, and rarely ever get fleas. They have a blast running and playing with each other in my yard at home. When they have had fleas, I have used Frontline drops, etc. But I also like Stronghold because it includes flea and heart worm if you needed to use both. The stronghold also treats ear mites. Sometimes dogs can pick these up from cats, or even at the groomer. Sometimes it's nice to have flea and heartworm treatment separate because then you can just treat your dog monthly for heartworm which is necessary, but you don't have to worry about flea treatment unless necessary.

In a perfect world, I wouldn't use any chemicals on my dogs, but of course we do have fleas out there, so I do use these as necessary. Really, all I can say is that my philosophy is to only treat when necessary. I do not put flea drops on my dogs every month because I know they many times contain permethrin in the drops, and so only if necessary seems to work best for me with the Stronghold or Frontline drops. I do however, always give my dogs their monthly heartworm pills.

Newborn Havanese are born with cute little pink noses and mouths. Then they begin in the first few weeks of life to start developing their color. All of our chocolate Havanese noses begin to turn chocolate brown. Even our white chocolate puppies may lighten in coat color to an almost cream or white color, but they will have the lovely chocolate nose and chocolate eye rims. Our chocolate Havanese have brown noses and brown eye rims. All of our black and tan, pure white, cream, or black and white parti color Havanese will go from pink noses to black noses.

Chocolate Havanese eyes when they are born are a very dark navy color. Then they begin to lighten over the next few weeks until by about 4 or 5 weeks they have blue eyes. However, these blue eyes have usually already turned in to their permanent yellowish/green color by the time the puppy is about 8 weeks old.

All of our black and tan, white, cream or black and white puppies are born with very dark eyes which begin to lighten until they are a lovely brown color.

One way to tell if you have a chocolate havanese is by the color of the eyes and nose - eyes will always been green/yellow and noses will be brown. Black and tans for instance will have dark brown eyes and black noses.