Maplewood is our home.

We're the Polizzi family, and we raise longhair miniature dachshunds in the New Hampshire hills. Our puppies are born in our living room and grow up underfoot, in the middle of four kids and everything a busy house sounds like. That everyday rhythm is most of what makes a puppy easy to live with wherever they end up.

How we got here

It started with Queen, our first miniature dachshund, and her pseudo brother, Jesse. We lost Jesse far too early, and by then the two of them had already rearranged our family. Two very small dogs with very large personalities, and a house that was better for having them in it.

That is the thing we wanted to pass on. We began breeding so other families could have what those two gave us, and our journey grew from there.

It is woven into the fabric of our life now. The dogs bring enrichment, joy, and a great deal of hard-won experience, and they have taught our children lessons we could not have taught them ourselves: patience, responsibility, how to be gentle with something small, and how to love something you will one day have to say goodbye to. It is the wholesome New Hampshire farm life we were hoping for when we moved here, and the dogs turned out to be the part that made it real.

How we think about the work

We take pride in developing our lines, and we breed with the whole breed in mind rather than one litter at a time. Selection, pairing, and placement are the three places a breeder can actually move the needle, and we treat each of them the same way every time: planned in advance, written down, and weighed against the generation before it, with health and temperament ahead of everything else.

Health, tested before we pair. Every dog in our program runs the full Embark panel before any breeding decision, and we add OFA evaluations on the dogs we're building our lines around. The results, and the links to verify them yourself, are on our health testing page.

Temperament, raised in. We handle the puppies from day one. Touch, voices, and the ordinary sounds of a busy house are part of their world before they're old enough to be wary of any of it, and it builds from there: our four kids, car rides, the vacuum and the dishwasher, and the other dogs in the house. Confident and social is something they grow into rather than something we hope for.

Conformation, used as a check. We show our dogs because the AKC ring is one of the few outside opinions on how a dog measures against the standard. When a dog finishes, it tends to confirm what we already believed; it doesn't replace careful health and temperament selection, and a title on its own isn't what gets a dog into our breeding program.

Hannah, for the record. Hannah came third, two dogs after Queen. She was our first cream and the first girl we would call a proper dam, and she is still the one we measure the others against. She raised her litters in our living room, retired in 2025, and went home to a family we'd gotten to know, who still send us updates. Every retired Maplewood girl gets that same landing.

The best part

We try not to think of it as selling puppies. We place them, into homes we've gotten to know, with families we're looking forward to hearing from for the next fifteen years.

And honestly, that is the part we love most. The family checking their email for the next round of photos. The first time they pick up the puppy they've been waiting months for. The note that arrives three years later about a dog who has quietly become the center of the household, the way only a dachshund can.