I would recommend Onyxia whelpling myself, or something like it, since I used it myself and loved it, and thought it worked very well.
Or the red dragonwhelp. It is good against flyers and can heal a bit and fly up in the air and take no damage for 1 round, but ofcourse miss with only 80% hit.
Then a beast killer, since you will be fighting a lot of beasts. I used the darkmoon tonk I believe, the zeppelin would also work wonder I think. Started thinking the mechanican pandaren dragonling would also do wonders here, thou I didnt have when I leveled my own, and later leveled for a friend on his bnet acc who didnt have the patience to level to 24.
And you need a crit killer too, so many wildpets you meet in the world are critters, and having a crit killer maes it a lot more easy.
I think I used Bananas on my own acc. Since my friend didnt have that one, I used the darkmooon monkey on his, but sure many others would do the trick too.
You write you want to use the lill bad wolf, but I have no experience with it myself, other then powerlevel mine, so I dont know how good or useful it is.
Also it depend on what you like yourself, if a maggot had been the best choice I would had refused to level with it myself, and picked one I wanted to look at.
Some wrote about guides, and they are useful, and you might wanna take a look at them. But you can also just try and start working at it, and yeah .. give it a go. We learn as we do it more, and what work for one might not for the other.
Healing is hell unless close to a stable master to you can start doing the dailyes for the bags and the bandages, so having heal on a pet do wonder, and having both a beast and critter killler help you win faster which will do less damage to your team.
As a last thing I would wish you good luck and promiss, it will get a lot more easy and faster
And believe it or not, you will end up with more bandages then you know what to do with in the end, but it is hell being without them in the start