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.

Today we brought Preston home. We got him from Chelle at Designerdoggies.com. She imports the dogs from breeders around the country and local buyers can come look at the litter and pick from the bunch. The earlier you put a deposit down, the earlier you get to choose from the litter. The website is

We think that today’s litter is probably one of the best puggle litters she’s had. We had the first deposit for the boys so we had first choice among all boys. There were 4 boys to choose from, 3 from 1 litter and one from a second litter. The three from one litter came from a set of larger parents, about 25 pounds, so they were much bigger than the last boy which came from a set of smaller parents, 15 pounds. Since we wanted a bigger dog, we decided to choose from the bigger sized boy puppies. We wanted a friendly puppy, one with a cute face and dark mask. Of the 3 larger male puppies to choose from, 2 stood out. Our Preston has a extremely cute face with a very dark mask, extremely wrinkled face and body, but his paws were brown and his coat is brown with black. The other boy puppy didn’t have as dark of a mask and his face wasn’t as wrinkled, but it had white paws, which we prefered, and a beautifully uniformly tan colored coat. It took us a long time to decide between the two. We played with both of them, picked them up and held them. But in the end, we choose Preston because of his extremely cute face since we’ll probably be looking at his face more often. We believe in the end, he was the best choice for us.
Update: Picking out Preston videos.