i am getting two puppies within the next month and i want to be super prepared for it and i was wondering if someone could give me a bit of advice on getting two puppies instead of one. is it okay to mix different dogs and different genders?
thanks
Welcome to chaz! You're off to a great start already coming here and looking for advice!
My first advice on getting two puppies: Don't.
Raising ONE puppy is very difficult, it's basically like raising a baby. You have to supervise the puppy CONSTANTLY if he's not in a crate - I suggest leashing your puppy to you so that he's always right under your eyes and you can redirect unwanted behaviors and reward good behaviors. I cannot stress this enough: You will have to ALWAYS watch the puppy and be thinking about what he should or should not be doing. Your puppy will quite literally take over your life for at least the first month or so.
And that's just one puppy.
With two puppies, you will have to enlist someone else in your household to watch one puppy while you watch the other. It is possible to watch both at the same time, but this will pretty much require 100% of your attention - you won't be able to do anything else besides watching the puppies.
Raising puppies also means that you should spend a LOT of time the first month or two working on socializing your puppy. They should experience something new (new location, different types of people and dogs, new activity, etc.) at LEAST twice a week. Socialization is, IMO, the most important part of raising a healthy, happy puppy, and it's not an area you want to "scrimp" on. But again, with two puppies, you'll have to work on this individually, especially if "issues" arise - one puppy is scared of large men, another doesn't want to walk on slippery surfaces - and you have to spend the time to teach them to be ok with these issues.
Having two dogs also poses more problems because of the dynamics between the puppies. Especially if they're litter mates, but even if they're not, you'll have to spend the majority of your "puppy time" with the puppies individually, so that they'll bond to you more than they bond to each other. They need to be with you individually more than they're with each other. This means that you should not crate them together - so you'll have to make space for two crates, preferably a good distance from each other - and you can't rely on just throwing the two puppies together as a good way to exercise them, YOU still have to exercise them. Individually.
You'll also have to watch out for resource guarding, a problem that might show up months or years after you get the puppies. They could guard food bowls (one puppy chases the other puppy away from his food bowl, sometimes becoming aggressive about it. and sometimes even when the bowl is empty), toys, even you.
If you do get two dogs, it is best to get seperate genders, or if that's not possible, two males. Either way, it will be even more important that you get them spayed or neutered around 6 months old, before the female goes into heat and before the males get very "hormonal."
Of course, this is all not to mention the double vet bills, double training classes (again, seperate classes for each puppy, so twice a week!), double food costs, etc.
I hope this helped, if you'll give more specific details about what kind of puppies and how old you want, we might be able to help even more. Again, I'm very glad you came here for advice before you got the puppies, and I do hope you'll stick around and post some pictures of the one(s) you choose!