Preston has a habit of takings anything he can get his teeth on and bringing it to his favorite spot which is under the chairs in the living room. There are 3 places in out apartment that he likes to hide out in: 1) under the low chairs we have in the living room 2) under the coffee table 3) under our bed. He likes areas where he can crawl under, like a safe place for him. He bites and takes shoes (all kinds), garbage can, socks, cushions, towels, and some of his toys to his place under the chair. He’s so cute when he tries to bring items to the chair, especially items that are bigger than him like the little garbage can.

Preston is mostly housebroken. When we take him outside to the grassy area, he will pee and poop there. Occasionally he still has accidents in the house, but not that often anymore. We are learning his movement and what he does to tell us he wants to go to the bathroom. We know that when he starts to really sniff around that he’s looking for a place to go to the bathroom. We’re thinking about training him to ring a bell my the door when he wants to “go potty”. I think we have a smart dog here.

Housetraining a puppy is not easy. We’ve read many books about how to housetrain a puppy and it seems Preston just doesn’t want to follow any of these rules.

1. He does not want to use the wee wee pad – we bought a bunch of wee wee pads which is supposed to encourage puppies to go on the pad instead of other places by using a “grass scent.” But Preston seems to ignore it. No matter where we place the pad, he goes somewhere else.

2. Go potty after eating – The books say to bring your dog outside after each meal and make sure he goes before coming back into the house. But we can’t get him to do that. After each meal we take him outside to the designated area and tell him to “go potty” but after 45 minutes waiting for him to go we decide to come back into the house. And guess what? Right after we bring him inside into his play pen area, he goes to the bathroom !! We can’t believe it. It seems like he holds it when he’s outside and then goes when he’s inside the house.

05/28/2007 Note: Preston is 10 months and 19 days old today. We often came back to this post and laughed about how frustrated we were back then. Preston is doing so well now. We never mentioned that the frustration we had with housetraining Preston only lasted a week. So, we felt there was a need to add some follow-up to this post. The day after we left the above post, we put away his 4’x4′ play pen and got a small (24″L) crate with a divider. We blocked off most of the space in the crate and only left him enough room to stand up and turn around. This was what all the books we read suggested but we were reluctant to do it at the begining. The smaller crate did the magic for us. He did not like to soil his sleeping area so he would learn to hold. In addition, we took him out to potty every couple of hours including at night and didn’t bring him back until he went potty. He eventually got used to going only on the grass. From the second week that we has him, he was pretty much potty trained except for rare accidents.