6:30 a.m. -- Toilet pup, feed and offer a drink, play with pup, and toilet before returning to crate.
Midmorning -- Toilet puppy, keep pup out of crate for play and/or training, toilet puppy before crating.
Noon -- Feed puppy second meal and offer water, toilet puppy, play time, toilet before crating.
Mid-afternoon-- Offer pup water, toilet them, quick walk or play time, return them to crate.
5:00 p.m. -- Feed puppy third meal and offer water, toilet puppy, allow puppy to play in kitchen while preparing dinner, toilet puppy before crating.
7:00 p.m.-- Toilet pup, play/training time, practice cradling while watching tv, return to crate. Cut off water access at this time.
Bedtime -- Toilet pup, play time before bed, pup sleeps in crate for the night.
Why can't we do that?
We have various puppy-containment structures: three dog crates and an exercise pen. Dionne spends part of the day in one or more of them, sleeping or playing. Often contented.
But unless one of us has just witnessed her peeing and pooping -- and I mean like within the last 5 minutes -- we react with alarm to any whining or barking or crying within a confinement vessel because it may mean that she needs to go out to poop or pee, distress that we ignore at our peril. So we scoop her up and carry her back to the farthest area of the yard and and watch her like a hawk until she poops and pees. Or we get tired of watching her screw around and give up.
I've had a fair amount of time during the last week to reflect on the difference in appearance of a puppy who needs to poop or pee from a puppy who's just screwing around. Puppy fun often consists of sniffing the ground intensely, moving from one spot after another, sometimes at rocket speed, but often stopping to rip up clumps of grass, chew on randomly encountered stones or pieces of bark, gnaw on plants, dig, squeeze under or behind the creepiest, most spider-infested objects in the yard, plow through piles of leaves, flop down on the ground. But puppies who need to poop do almost exactly the same things! The only way you can tell the difference is if they actually poop.
During the course of writing these last few paragraphs, I had Dionne in the exercise pen in my office. Twice, after she whined, I put down my iPad, took her down the stairs and all the way out back. Each time she peed. But then she only screwed around. I returned her to the pen, started writing again, and she barked at me and whined loudly. Then she began to race around in circles within the pen. I knew what was happening. I jumped up and grabbed her as she squeezed out two little balls of poop, but I terrified her by snatching her up, running down the stairs, depositing her on the patio, and yelling, "HURRY!"
She deposited the rest of the very substantial load and is now sleeping like a little angel.
Because Steve and I have raised four previous CCI puppies, I know -- intellectually -- that in just two months, she'll be so well adjusted to our routines that I will once again begin to forget what these earliest days are like. That's why I'm recording it.
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