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.