Getting off

All the ground we've been covering with Dionne in the past few days has been gratifying. But it also has made us aware of a little problem area: she's still afraid to jump out of the kennel (in the back of our van.)

Ordinary treats just aren't cutting it.

The following video illustrates what we're up against. You'll see some success at the end of it, but that occurred Monday night when we took her to puppy class. The presence of the other pups lured her out.  But normally she finds it too creepy. 

Highs and lows

I thought I was going to have such a nice little post for today. At last night's puppy class, Dionne behaved well, despite the presence of two new little fluff balls that she obviously longed to romp with. It's hard to believe she looked like them just a few weeks ago. Now, halfway through puppy kindergarten, she's learned so much.









From the class, we drove to the yacht club to grab a couple of burgers, and once again, Dionne's behavior was exemplary, considering that it was her first time out to a restaurant, and that she's still less than five months old.

But things went downhill fast around 3:30 a.m., when she loudly threw up in her kennel. (This is our fourth vomiting adventure in the past 6 weeks. But who's counting?)


This morning, when I tried to use my newly developing diagnostic skills on the vomit, I found it looked like dogfood -- except that it was congealed into an almost solid mass. Poking at it with the turkey needles revealed that it was filled with tough, stringy, and obviously indigestible fibers.

I recognized those fibers -- the stuffing from the little dog bed she's been chewing on since we first introduced her to it.

I can be soft-hearted, but I try not to be soft-headed for too long. The bed is now in the trash.

Here's the bed, in the dumpster.

And Dionne seems as energetic as ever. We withheld breakfast, but fed her her normal lunch, which she wolfed down. She's on VERY tight restrictions, however, as we had a load of mulch delivered Sunday. We can only imagine what it would do to her delicate tummy, were she to start snacking on it. We don't intend to find out.

Stepping out

It was a busy weekend.  On Saturday, Dionne went to three grocery stores, Costco, a cookware store, and a nursery. Yesterday she attended an Oscar party. This morning she and Steve went on a foray to Fry's.

So far, so good. I had one bad moment at Costco, when she seemed to be sniffing the floor with particular urgency. I had successfully directed her to pee in the parking lot, but I was afraid she might need to poop. But I finally decided the floor aromas simply were fascinating. ("The floor in Costco IS probably extraordinarily smelly," Steve pointed out.)

He says she woofed, loudly, at the pleasant dog-loving Hmong man who was assisting him in Fry's. And she tried to snatch a few things from the shelves there.

But mostly, she has stared at us (and our cache of treats) adoringly, sat when ordered to, and trotted along nicely beside the carts. Off to a good start.

Under the microscope

Friday night one of our close friends made a comment that implied he thought Dionne was the most unruly, incorrigible puppy we'd ever had. "What in the world makes you think that?" Steve and I exclaimed. "I read your blog," he replied. "I know about all these bad things she's been doing." 

We were flabbergasted. The truth is we both think Dionne may be doing better than any of our previous CCI pups. At only four and a half months, she's already mastered 16 commands. She's a joy to walk with, and she has a spirited, lovable disposition. 

"You only think that because I'm recording everything she does!" I told Howie. "I didn't do that for our other puppies." 

I'm doing it now because I thought it would be interesting to examine the puppy-raising experience -- from pick-up to turn-in (to graduation? In our dreams!) under the microscope, trying to record it as fully as possible. Steve and I continue to find raising CCI pups to be a complex and interesting enterprise. I wanted to share it.

Not surprisingly, maintaining this blog is prompting me to be aware of and think about every aspect of raising Dionne, including all the negative ones, like yesterday, when she threw up her breakfast under our dining table. In the past, I probably would have made Steve clean it up, averting my eyes. Labrador and golden retriever puppies tend to eat all kinds of things they shouldn't eat, and vomiting is a pretty common activity. If I weren't blogging about Dionne, I would have assumed it was just another such episode.

Instead I shoveled the vomit yesterday onto a plate, got out a turkey pin, and poked around. The good news is that I found something -- an inch-long caterpillar-ish creature (some kind of larva?)

It would certainly make me throw up, were I to eat one. But I have no idea is if this is what upset Dionne's tummy. Steve thinks not. "Dogs eat bugs all the time," he harrumphed. I, on the other hand, think the bug is the likely culprit. Moreover, I'm happy that we found nothing worse. We could have. (I think of the story I once heard about a CCI puppy who ate a pin cushion -- full of pins. That had to be retrieved surgically.)

Being on short (post-vomiting) rations can make a girl feel sad.

Such drastic action seems unlikely in this case. We fed Dionne no lunch yesterday, and gave her rice and cottage cheese for dinner last night and breakfast today. An hour ago, she wolfed down her cup of puppy chow. She's been racing around, wagging her tail, clearly NOT undisposed. She probably hasn't learned her lesson yet -- that eating gross things has gross consequences. Somehow along the line, dogs seem to get that, though again I haven't a clue how it happens.

Friday

Dog names

Deinonychus

Does anyone else give their dogs (or their service-pups-in-training) funny alternative names? We don't get to pick the names of our CCI pups; they come with their names as a package. But Steve and I somehow wind up bestowing bizarre nicknames on all of them (a continuation of our practice with the canine pets that we had before we started raising canine companions.) I should probably be ashamed to admit any of this (much less write about it). But somehow it feels to me like part of the Experience.

Tucker, for example, gets called not only the normal and respectable "Tuck," but also Tuckerbell (which in turn is a contraction of Tuckleberry Hound Dog) and Tuckerman. Brando, our one success story, somehow became Brandonioni or Brandini when he resided here. We dubbed Darby "Darbinski" and "Darbinscus" and "Darberella." How she did so is now lost in the mists of memory, but Yuli acquired the alias of "Snork."

The strange thing is that we weren't using the nicknames because we had any objection to the dogs' real names. I've loved all our dogs' names -- until we got Dionne. Mostly I prefer not to give dogs names that normally belong to humans. Dionne arguably isn't the most common human name on the planet; we often end up having to explain it to strangers ("like Dionne Warwick"). But it sounds first and foremost like a human name to me, so from the start, I was curious to see what it would morph into within our household.

We never consciously select the alter-names; they just sort of... emerge. When Dionne was in her most aggressively mouthy stage, I toyed with the idea of re-naming her Deinonychus (after that nasty little dinosaur who played a role in Jurassic Park). But that hasn't stuck. Instead more often then not, I we call her "Dionnicus." Once in a while, "Dionne-y" emerges from my mouth.

And when she's being sweet, who can resist calling her Princess?

Cleared for take-off

We've received our puppy raiser ID cards for Dionne from CCI. They've got no legal status. Unlike working assistance dogs, the trainees need not be allowed to enter public establishments. We're supposed to use our "tact, education, and diplomacy" to gain access to such places. It's all a matter of goodwill. Over the years, I think I've pulled out my ID card once or twice. Still the cards carry some symbolic value; I see them as the green light from CCI to take off into the wide world. One's puppy is now fully immunized and hopefully civilized enough to avoid disgracing itself -- or its caretakers -- in public places.

So I'll soon be reporting on how Dionne did on forays into our grocery stores, warehouse goods purveyors, libraries, movie theaters, and beyond. I have mixed feelings about the start of this new phase. When Steve and I first began raising service dogs, I couldn't wait for it. I thought that taking my puppy on such adventures would be the coolest thing in the world.

What I've learned is that there are moments when it is. I'll never forget the trip to Vegas on which Brando came along. In the casinos, heads turned, people everywhere exclaimed over him, charmed to see such a sweet young creature in such a jaded setting. Even in more mundane places, puppies draw attention. It's very common to be stopped and asked about them and the program. I've found that I usually enjoy talking to folks about it. It enhances my sense of belonging to a friendly community.

But sometimes the questions are unwanted interruptions of a tedious chore that I just want to complete. More than that, I've learned that it's more work to do anything -- shop for groceries, watch a movie, go out to dinner -- with a puppy in tow.

More often than not, we take our pup along anyway, because it's our job as puppy-raisers to expose our charges to as many new experiences as possible. The goal is to get them to the point where it's not much more work to have them along; when they behave like paragons. Until you get to that point, you just have to hold your breath and cross your fingers that they won't do something bizarre -- like taking a dump in the middle of the cereal aisle, or inching their way under a movie seat to stick their noses in someone's crotch.

Stay tuned...

Home again, home again

So here's Steve, a few hours ago, cleaning up the deposit of (oh, NO!!!) puppy poop that he discovered in a far corner of the front room.

This shocked us. Dionne hasn't done anything like that since before I started maintaining my Toileting Errors log back on January 12.

But we know what happened. Yesterday, I picked her up from the home of Linda Dreyfuss, who was puppy-sitting her while we were in San Francisco, and I forgot to ask when was the last time Dionne had pooped. My bad. Although she dutifully peed both at Linda's and when we got home, the daily schedule of puppy poop production, usually never far from our minds, had slipped off our radar over the course of our brief time away. And obviously, she still hasn't learned to command our attention when she needs to go out.

Otherwise, however, it was gratifying to hear Linda's report on their time together. She exclaimed over and over about how much she enjoyed hosting Dionne, and she said Dionne didn't emit a peep over the course of her day in the classroom yesterday (Linda's a teacher who takes her CCI pups to school with her.) Although acknowledging Dionne's occasional outbursts of wildness, Linda shrugged that off as normal. Balancing the insane intervals, apparently, were periods when our girl settled down, angelic, to watch Linda work in the kitchen.

That's the kind of homecoming present we appreciate!

On vacation

When I first heard about CCI and puppy-raising, one of the things that instantly appealed to me was hearing that the community included folks who were happy to puppy-sit. As much as Steve and I enjoy raising these dogs, we also love to travel, and we do it as much as we can. One of the worst thing about dog-ownership, for me, has always been figuring out what to do with the dog(s) when we're away. Putting any pet in a commercial kennel is the choice of last resort, given that they're potentially dangerous, expensive, and we suspect the dogs hate it.

The puppy-sitting promise has proven to be true, over the years. For the most part, we've received great support and wonderful care for our pups from folks we've gotten to know and trust -- and have asked personally. But this spring we have an unusually busy schedule of upcoming trips, including a last-minute run up to San Francisco this weekend. To my dismay, all the folks in my normal cadre of puppy-sitters were unavailable, so in desperation I sent off a plea to the CCI puppy-sitting coordinator.

Dionne was glowing with excitement at the
opportunity to stay with Linda Dreyfuss, who together with her daughter
has previously raised 9 CCI pups! 

Nancy Fairfield is relatively new to that job, but now that I've tried out the system, I want to sing her praises. When I e-mailed her, she passed along my request to her network within minutes. Early the next morning, I got a call from volunteer in Del Mar who sounded wonderful, and we made plans for her and her husband to take Dionne over the long weekend. But a week later, the husband developed a health problem, and they had to cancel. Even closer to our departure date, I was beginning to imagine having to cancel the whole trip. But I e-mailed Nancy again and got no less than 5 responses within a day or so.

I find this wonderfully gratifying. We in America today may not have fellow villagers to help us raise our children. But it feels like we CCI puppy-raisers in San Diego do have that sort of support. It feels great.

The battle of the habits

The more experience I have with puppies, the more convinced I become that habits are a key to understanding life. I recorded recently how Dionne got up on my desk, snatched one of my pens, chewed it, and got ink all over my rug. 

By dint of lots of elbow grease and rug-cleaning chemicals, Steve has managed to expunge most of the ink stains. Tomorrow morning, our local carpet cleaners will arrive, and we're hopeful they'll improve things even more. But what we failed to anticipate is that Dionne almost immediately stole and chewed another pen.  And another.  And another. We've caught her getting up on Steve's desk too, trying to steal pens. 

It's become her new habit.  We know we have to respond by making it impossible for her to get to our desks and pens, unsupervised. But that will require us always to close our office doors (or to supervise every second that she's in either office.) Both those things will require us to acquire new habits. 

It's not clear who will win...

Training

We had class again Monday night, and once again there were only two dogs. This time the other was a little guy (Pirate) -- only 11 weeks old.  Once again, Bob seemed impressed by how Dionne was doing. And I had a chance to ask for a refresher in how to teach the Shake command.

With so many of the commands, I seem to forget from one puppy to the next how to teach them. That seems pathetic, given that we're on our fifth CCI pup. But the teachers (first Mike and now Bob) never seem to roll their eyes. They patiently explain, yet again.

Actually, Bob didn't sound 100% sure himself.  (I assume they don't teach the police dogs (Bob's day job as a K9 cop) how to Shake.) But he suggested we could try tapping the back of Dionne's paw or alternatively, holding up a treat where she would naturally try to paw at it.

We had a little training session earlier today. You can see how it takes me a while to figure it out. But eventually, things start clicking. You can also see how nicely she responds to the Down command.

Just a short while ago, that seemed hopeless too.

Grooming

It took Steve and me many years to wrap our heads around the idea of brushing dog teeth. Neither of us grew up with dogs who had their teeth brushed. (Who did that back in the 50s and 60s?) We got our own first dog in 1977, and I don't remember ever having her teeth cleaned -- even at the vets.  I think we just accepted the idea that dogs had stinky breath. You dealt with it.

Somewhere along the line, we became conscious that good dog owners were supposed to brush their pets' teeth. We acquired canine toothbrushes and Steve began brushing the beast teeth when I read bedtime stories to our sons (listening as he brushed.) But it didn't become a real Responsibility until we acquired Tucker and learned that brushing his teeth "at least three times a week" was listed among our duty as conscientious puppy-raisers. Now, eight years and four pups later, it's almost as much part of our routine as cleaning our own choppers.

Steve gets all the credit for this. He's developed a complicated grooming routine that he executes faithfully. Already Dionne has accepted the program. She was one of the few pups who never tried to bite the brush. Sometimes she tries to bat it away, but overall, she submits to the dental ministrations more than she resists them.

Another step is ear-cleaning. The dogs almost seem to enjoy that. Steve squirts a solution onto a cotton ball...





...and swabs. (Interestingly, some dogs just naturally seem to have dirty ears, but it's too early to tell about Dionne.

Most tricky is toenail-maintenance, another task we never messed with pre-CCI. When we got Tucker, we bought a set of clippers. The black quick of his toes was relatively easy to see through his white nails, so we managed to trim them without spilling too much blood. But when we got black, black Yuli,  avoiding the quick seemed hopeless, and we switched to a little battery-powered Dremel drill that grinds away the nail, rather than cutting it.

All our puppies since them have adjusted nicely to being Dremeled. Dionne is the latest member of that well-groomed club.




 

Wild dogs of the forest

The other day I categorized Dionne's pen-chewing escapade as being the worst mischief any of our CCI pups has gotten into. But the worst moment in our lives as puppy raisers -- by far -- occurred about a year ago. We had taken both Tucker and Darby (Dionne's predecessor) up to Julian, where we were gathering with some close friends in the mountain home of one couple in the group. Tucker had been there several times before, and he'd enjoyed running free on the large unfenced property. But when Darby woke us around 3 a.m. and Steve took her and Tucker out to pee, Tucker didn't just run around. He streaked off, disappearing into the night with Darby in his wake.

This was an astounding thing for Tucker to do. He's normally the meekest and most mild-mannered of fellows. Never once has he attempted to bolt out our front door. But clearly, the wild freedom of being up in the mountain woods deranged him. It was freezing cold and pitch black. I finally dragged myself out of bed to see why Steve and the dogs were taking so long to return, and when Steve told me what had happened, I panicked. We stood on the porch, trying to clap our hands and whistle and call the dogs back loudly enough for them to hear us -- but not so loud as to wake up everyone else in the house. On the verge of tears, I struggled to suppress images of our two charges being attacked by coyotes or mountain lions -- or simply breaking a leg with a misstep or losing an eye to an unfortunate encounter with a low branch.

After a long, long time, we heard the distant jingle of their collars, and the pair of them eventually bounded up, panting and wagging their tails. We herded them into the house and eventually got back to sleep. (Unbelievably, Tucker ran away again in the morning, again with Darby in tow. We finally found them in the custody of a neighbor who was a sheriff's deputy.)

Despite this drama, our patient and generous friends invited us to bring Tucker again for another gathering yesterday, this time with Dionne. We gratefully accepted but vowed that neither dog would have a moment's opportunity to escape.

Taking such a young pup up to Julian reminded us of the car trip we took with our first son when he was about two. We crammed that vehicle so full with toddler-management gear there was barely room for passengers.  To help keep Dionne under control we took three kennels AND an x-pen, along with dog-drying towels, food, toys, treats, bowls, leashes and halters. 

Things went so much better. We stuck to our resolve, made easier by the fact that a snowstorm had moved in. By late evening, a couple of inches had built up, and when Steve and I stole out of the house to walk both dogs in the early morning light, we exclaimed over and over at the magical transformation that the snow had wrought. Dionne seemed startled by it at first, but then the light went on and she clearly got it: "OMG! I can stick my snout down into this cold white stuff!  I can dig into it, and it's even edible!"

It would have been a blast to release her and watch her tear around like a crazy puppy and frolic in it. But we resisted. The memory of last year's adventure was too fresh.

The worst

In addition to growing with freakish speed and having almost no more toileting accidents in the house, Dionne once again has resumed sleeping through the night. She went from 10:15 p.m. last night to 6:15 yesterday. But as if to remind us that she is still a very young puppy, she also did the worst thing that perhaps any of our CCI pups has ever done.

I had gone out to coffee with a friend. But somehow my departure slipped Steve's mind, and at some point he assumed Dionne was upstairs in my office under my supervision. She was up there all right. But, in my absence, she apparently stood up at my desk and helped herself to a pen. Then she settled down for a good chew. Apparently she moved around at several points. We know this because when Steve finally discovered what was going on, the light tan carpet in my office was stained with black ink in half a dozen places.

Steve made a valiant attempt to blot it up. He sprayed all the spots with carpet cleaning foam. He scrubbed and scrubbed (clearly feeling guilty that this disaster had unfolded on his watch.) For a brief while, we thought these efforts worked. But when the foam dried, ugly dark smudges still showed, as obvious as if someone had come up to scuff around on the rug after shuffling through the ashes of a campfire.

It must be said that the rug is more than 16 years old. It's been peed and vomited on and blood-spotted by literally generations of puppies. Always before, however, with the aid of in-house chemicals and regular visits from our neighborhood carpet cleaners, we were able to restore it to semi-respectability. Still we would have conceded some time ago that it was time to replace it -- except that when we finally  do that, the project will require lugging out of the room all my bulging file cabinets and a large couch. Worse still, we'll have to disassemble my 14-feet-long desk, and store it somewhere until the new flooring goes in.

"Maybe we should just resign ourself to living in squalor, as long as we're raising puppies," Steve mused.

I don't think I can bear that. On the other hand, I don't see how I can bear to dismantle my office. It makes me want to go off and chew something up myself.

Four months old today!

Dionne weighed 36.6 pounds yesterday -- compared to 15.6 when I picked her up two months ago. That's a gain of 21 pounds! We've calculated that she eats 11.5 ounces of Eukanuba Large Breed Puppy Chow daily -- a total of approximately 34 pounds since we got her. But by our calculations, she also has excreted at least 100 pounds of solid waste.

So where is the world is all the dog coming from?


At this rate, there's no way I'll be able to lift her a month from today!

Complete immunity

Steve took Dionne in today for her last set of puppy shots. Now, at least according to modern veterinary theory, she should be protected from canine distemper, adenovirus, parvovirus, leptospirosis, parainfluenza, bordatella, and rabies.

Whew!

Steve said she was very brave and all the vet office staff loved her.  But an exceedingly ugly bulldog in the waiting room freaked her out (or so Steve says.)

She may not have whimpered when she got her shots. But she certainly thought the best part of the experience was getting the post-injection biscuit. 

Bringing up bébé chien

I recently read a fascinating book called Bringing Up Bébé, about the experiences and observations of an American woman who moved with her British husband to Paris, where they then had three children. The author, Pamela Druckerman, immediately began to notice profound differences between the average French person's approach to child raising and the norms that are common in the US. She began to pay close attention and eventually wrote the book. I wish I'd read it before I had my two sons. But in a weird way I feel I'm benefitting from it, even as a puppy-raiser.

Druckerman's book makes it clear that French parents share a confidence that their children can and should learn to do many things that make them much easier to live with, e.g. sleep through the night by the time they're a few months old, eat everything they're served, entertain themselves for substantial periods of time. This is the cultural norm, and it's reinforced by French parents sharing their practices with each other. I think it helped me to realize that waking up at 2 a.m. every night to take a whining puppy out into the cold might not necessarily be a demonstration of puppy-raising virtue but rather stupidity. It prompted me to ask for advice from both Becca at the CCI office and the puppy-raisers at the social gathering on Saturday. Steve and I have been following their suggestions, and the results feel nearly miraculous.

Cut off from her water supply just an hour or so earlier, Dionne slept until 5 a.m Sunday morning. She whined then, but instead of springing out of bed, I shushed her. She barked about 5:30, but when I told her (once) "Quiet!" she quieted! I finally got up and took her out at 6, not wanting to push my luck.

This morning, she slept till 5:40, and then again when I told her, "Shhhh," she grew silent. Again, I took her out at 6, with no accidents. This all seems to confirm that waking up in the middle of the night was simply a bad habit she fell into, one that should rightfully be discouraged.

On other fronts too, it feels like we're making real progress. My log of "Toileting Accidents" on the refrigerator shows that eleven days have passed since the last time she peed in the house.  She still gets into sharkish moods from time to time and tries to chomp on my hands or clothes. We didn't find yelping and shrieking in response to be a very useful strategy. (For one thing, it tends to freak out any other humans within earshot.) But I've learned that pinching the skin under her tongue (with one finger inside her mouth and the other under her jaw) seems effective. She never cries, but she seems to back off on the biting attack.

She's still much too young and mischievous to be allowed to roam the house and yard unsupervised. But increasingly, she seems content to stretch out near us to watch what's going on, or snooze. At two days short of four months old, she's come a long way, bébé.

Play date

When we got Tucker, our first CCI puppy, one of the pleasures of the early days was taking him to puppy play sessions up at the Oceanside headquarters. I hated the drive (at least 45 minutes each way, often lengthened by traffic jams), but I did it because watching Tucker romp with the other little ones was such jolly fun.

Somewhere along the line, a decision was made to eliminate the Saturday morning play sessions (for reasons I can't remember). That spared me the commute. But it was a loss. 

So when I got notice that Chris Harrell was organizing a play session for little pups up at the Oceanside campus of MiraCosta College this morning, I wanted to take Dionne. I think of Chris as a puppy master. She's raised 9 dogs, and 4 of them have graduated. She works at the college and can arrange to use one of the playing fields. It's a great place for baby dogs to romp. 

Predictably, Dionne barreled into the action, ecstatic. Someone had brought a yellow stuffed toy, which she appropriated, taunting the other puppies and playing her most favorite game (keep away). She ran and ran and ran and ran. A little wrestling, a little butt-sniffing. A premiere social event! 

Here's a glimpse of what it looked like:

After we'd been there for about 45 minutes, we corralled our charges and formed a big circle in the grass. This is another throwback to the old days. After those Saturday morning play sessions in Oceanside, the puppy-raisers would engage in what always felt a bit to me like group therapy. (Or an AA meeting, someone suggested: "My name is Jeannette and I'm a serial puppy raiser.  I can't help it.")

Circle time

Each person introduced him- or herself and puppy. Most of us had raised at least 4 or 5 dogs. When it was my turn, I confided the recent troubles we were having with Dionne waking up in the middle of the night. I told everyone what Becca had recommended, and I explained that Steve and I went to sleep last night, girding our loins to try her advice to ignore Dionne's whining, at least for a while. And then Dionne confounded us by sleeping till 5:10 this morning. (Steve's reading was that Dionne must have read Becca's e-mail over my shoulder and decided to mess with our minds.)

I also mentioned that we'd been cutting off Dionne's water supply by 7, but one of the other puppy-raisers suggested that was too late. "If she's got lots of opportunities to drink during the day, she'll be fine." Heads nodded. It struck me that last night Dionne didn't drink after 5 p.m. (because we took her to our Friday night movie group.)

Whether that explains why she did better, I don't know. But it felt great to be reassured that Dionne will be fine if she gets her last drink of the day at 5 or 6. Sometimes hanging out with the pack can be not only fun, but educational.

Help!

Here's what one looks like. 

This being the first of the month, it's the day when I normally send in my monthly Puppy Report to CCI.  It's a form that we're supposed to fill out, and it covers all the basic information. We send them in to the Oceanside center electronically.

Although there's a place for it on the form, I've never asked for someone to contact me; usually Steve and I have saved our questions for puppy class or other puppy raisers.  But yesterday, before even sending in the report, I e-mailed Becca, the program coordinator.

In the Subject line,  I put "Sleep Torture"  Then I wrote that Dionne had started waking up between 2 and 4 a.m. every night -- despite previously sleeping consistently until 5:30 or 6 a.m.  "Steve takes her out and she invariably pees; last night she defecated too. In answer to the obvious questions, we do restrict her from drinking water after about 7 p.m. and we take her out for a final toileting session around 10." I explained how we had eliminated the possibility that she might have a bladder infection and added, "What really bothers me is that we know she was capable of sleeping through the night. But now, even though she's growing by leaps and bounds, she seems to have fallen into this pattern of wanting an outing in the wee hours. Can you recommend anything we could do?"

Today Becca answered, "Oh dear!  Sleep torture is no good."  She asked what Dionne did if we ignored her. "Will she keep fussing indefinitely, or eventually have an accident in the crate? My first suggestion is to try waiting her out a little bit.  When she starts making noise, wait 10 or 15 minutes before taking her out.  She might fall back asleep and be able to hold out until morning.  Or, at least, you should be able to gradually push her back until she can wait a little longer each night and you'll eventually move the time back to 5 or 6 am again.

Never fear, we'll get her back on schedule again!"

We haven't tried ignoring Dionne, but now we're emboldened.  We'll start tonight!