My first month as a new dog owner

I understand now that I oversimplified what having a dog meant and probably only thought about taking them on walks, doing some training exercises and playing with them. So the first two weeks were super overwhelming. We got a 4 month old rescue and he was already potty trained, so we thought we skipped the difficult part. I was not mentally prepared. I was in my head 24/7 thinking about the dog, being with the dog or looking at videos on how to train a dog. I was so scared of doing things wrong, teaching him the wrong thing, being a bad dog owner, that I cried a couple of times.

Things that helped me makes sense again we're keeping a journal. Simply listing when he woke up, when he napped, how long a walk was, what play we did or training, helped a lot to refer back to a day later. Finding what routine was slowly forming, helped make a day more predictable.

Next up was to not keep thinking about when he did something 'wrong' and keep feeling upset about it. Telling myself he's just a baby helped. He just wants to do what he thinks is fun and doesn't like me telling him he can't. Redirecting helped sometimes, or interrupting with a small training session for food as well. I still have times where I'm just exhausted and don't have the patience to be calm and collected, but there's moments where I am, and I see how that works better.

I was also scared of trying new things, being convinced it wouldn't work and just the thought would stress me out. For instance, we brought him to the vet the second week since he had some issue with his eye. We got a cream for it, that we had to apply 3x a day in his eye. I was dreading this, but my partner was super calm, letting the dog sniff, reassuring the dog, taking his time to make the dog feel like he could trust us. The first two days were still very difficult, but in the following days, my partner actually could apply it by himself and the dog wouldn't really mind as much. More things like that happened as well, were the first one or two times it seemed like it wasn't going to work, but turned out okay later. Another example is that we got him a food toy, so he has to work a bit harder to eat his food. At first he would use his paw to drag the toy around and bite in it. I thought this wasn't going to work and he would just break the toy, but now he sits patiently for us to to give the signal he can eat and almost doesn't drag it around at all. Now it's actually a calm moments where we can just give him some food and do stuff in the meantime.

All in all, I'm getting better adjusted. It's still a big learning curve and I've accepted that it's going to take months, maybe years to really feel like it's second nature. Hope this helps some others on here too.