Puppy Woes

Ugh. It is before 7am on Saturday and I have been up for almost two hours.

Dylan and I have been sharing puppy duty. Dylan stays up until midnight and is responsible for taking the dog out until 3am. At 3am we switch and I am responsible.

I go to bed at around 10pm these days, so getting up at 5am isn't terrible, but it especially sucks on a Saturday morning.

We have for the most part been keeping him in our bathroom overnight with a good set of toys and bones and his bed and his kennel if he wants to sleep in there.

He gets up at least once in the middle of the night and then he gets up for the day at 5 or 5:30. Then he is up for at least an hour and a half, or until 7am which when I would normally get up for work.

I foolishly keep thinking that he might go back to sleep after a little bit of being up at 5:30, so I go back upstairs with him, but then we just whines or barks, even if I put him on our bed or on the floor.

That is the other issue. He can be very vocal. Freya generally is quiet. She will bark when she plays sometimes but will be quiet when we tell her too and then every now and then bark at dogs walking by if they actually come to our fence or when the neighbor cat comes and sits on our fence. She has always been pretty quiet. Ares barks to get Freya to play with him. Which is pretty much all the time. He also barks when he goes to a "people door: to the house and no one will let him in, even though he definitely knows how to use the doggie door.

During the day, we leave Ares and Freya in the bathroom/laundry room which has the doggie door, so they have a place to chill inside and they can be outside as much as they want. He has not made a mess in there once. He has made a couple of other messes though (I think only 7 or 8 total). He will potty outside when he is out there, but I don't think he has really gotten the concept that he is only supposed to potty outside. Only one time have we really had a chance to "catch him in the act" and yell at him for pottying inside. Dylan said I actually did a good job yelling. We generally try to take the no-physical contact approach to training, and that has generally worked (except for barking, still trying to figure out how to make him be quiet...). The hard part is that we just take him outside about every 30 minutes. Sometimes we just leave him (since he can come back in whenever) and other times we will make sure he goes potty (especially when we plan an doing something else with him, like go drive somewhere). I don't think he has really had that much of a chance to go outside on his own. We started out really good on forcing the doggie door, but most of this week we just took him outside when we were home. Dylan said yesterday he started going back to the doggie door pushing again and that he went out all on his own (trying to follow Freya of course) without us directing him to the doggie door.

We will get there. I really wish we were starting training this weekend but our trainer we had for Freya, and who we love, doesn't have a new puppy class that starts for another 2 weeks. I guess we will try to start things on our own for obedience.

Also, he does not know his name, at all. He rarely even turns his head when he hears it. I know it took Freya a couple weeks to learn her name though.

So in general just a big sigh. I know this whole new puppy thing is work, but still. I do appreciate Freya a whole lot since she is such a good dog though.

(also, sorry no pictures, but my computer doesn't work and I am on Dylan's and it is way too much effort to get pictures on a Mac)