Puppies and Sleeping: The Week from Hell

Just face it: your first week with your puppy is going to be, well, overwhelming, at least.

He won't be used to you; you won't be used to him; your other pets will need to adjust; your other family members will need to adjust. Your furniture arrangement will need to adjust; your cleanliness and tidiness in your home will need to adjust; your friends will need to adjust; your far away kinfolk will call you crazy; the 5 thousand puppy gates you start working with will need to adjust, as will the pet store, where you suddenly have to make 80 million decisions about puppy food, toys, chewies, crates, leashes, collars, food bowls, whether to buy something soft for the crate--or not!

Oh, yeah, and setting up that first visit with the vet.

Throw in sticker shock at how much it all costs, too.

I'm going to be honest with you. It is not pretty.

Most of all, you'll be tackling SO many problems all at once that your head will swim, and you will probably be doing this without anywhere NEAR enough sleep for about 3 to 7 nights. By day 5, the puppy's cuteness will no longer outweigh the hassles involved in this early time period. You will seriously consider returning him to the breeder, and/or falling into a heap and crying for about 15 good minutes from pure exhaustion and overwhelmedness and regret at ever having THOUGHT about adopting a puppy.

I tend to talk in extremes. A trained professional dog handler (not mine; he was understanding) might even scoff at my report, saying that all this is just a result of my amateurism.

But, well, the problem is--I AM an amateur. And it REALLY WAS the week from H. E. DOUBLE HOCKEY STICKS, as Flanders says on the Simpsons.

Why is this week so difficult?

Mine was because my puppy was in a crate, howling a heart-ripping song of injustice to the farthest corners of the universe--REALLY REALLY LOUDLY--literally ALL night long. I mean ALL. NIGHT. LONG.

Jack howled for 6 straight nights without even taking a 5 minute break at any time during any night.

By day 6, the day that, thank GOD, we had an in-person meeting with the trainer, my head was hanging down like a rag doll, I was totally depressed from lack of sleep, and for all I know, i was probably in such a stupor that i was drooling onto my jeans.

OH, it was bad.

But it got fixed in a one-hour session with our amazing trainer. And FINALLY, last night, which was night SEVEN, he slept all night without much of a peep, and didn't even wake up till 7 or 7:30 am--because of what my trainer said to do.

Here's what we were doing before last night. (And all that we were doing was CORRECT, which I know from googling like a deranged Siberian postal worker, every minute the puppy was asleep during the day, trying to find out if what we were doing was right, as it seemed so wrong.)

You're supposed to make him sleep in a crate. You have to harden your heart severely and vow with your spouse NEVER to let him out of the crate no matter how bad it gets. See "The Odyssey: lashing shipmates to mast while hearing Song of Sirens.")

What if he has to go potty?

On this point, you do calculations so complex, they resemble algebra 2, to figure out if your pup should be able to go all night without being taken out. The trainer did this for us.

We had to consider the following: age of pup, bladder size of pup, whether pup needs to have food and water out round the clock, whether food and water can be removed at 6 pm to prevent night time pottying, whether allowing pup to come out of crate (but still be in a pen) to potty on papers is worth the damage it will do to the potty training efforts during the day, which don't allow for pottying on paper, whether we should set the alarm to take the puppy out during the night, how to take the puppy out while it's screaming, without teaching it that screaming gets it out of the crate, and how many hours the pup can really be expected to go through the night without going potty, and what to do in the middle of the night if you find poop all over the crate and all over the dog. Or pee. Which you probably will.

See what I mean?

For US, the trainer said to put him in his crate in the evening when the family goes to bed, and let him wail. He said the pup would almost be able to go through 8 hours without going out, except that this pup should have food 24 hours a day, which complicates the potty habits because if he eats and drinks all night, he's going to go potty. So we had to put him in a plastic crate inside a huge other metal cage, with his plastic crate door open, so he could come in and out and go potty on papers if he wanted. We had to leave food and water in his plastic crate. Still, the trainer said we should just sleep for 8 hours and not worry. He said that once the pup gets a bit older and sleeps only in the plastic crate, if a problem arises of him pottying during the night, we shouldnt put much blanketry in there, as it could encourage him to potty, but rather put a small square just big enough for him to sleep on, and increase it gradually.

Wow.

So we did it all perfectly. And the howling began.

So after 6 nights of this, it turned out that the puppy wasn't going pee or poop all night on any night. This was a lucky break. Oh, wait. On night 6, he did make a small poop. I think it was "an anomaly" as the trainer said, because of stress, not the beginning of a habit. But small poop and anomaly or not, it cost me a lot of time and grossness the next morning cleaning up the dog, the kennel, the everything. Oh, I was drained. What if I'd had to have done that cleanup at 2 am? How do people live through all this?

Plus, my husband (Bill) and I were so worried about minimizing the time Jack had to go without be taken out potty that we started sleeping in shifts. I'd go to sleep at 9, and Bill stayed up till 12 and put Jack to bed at 12. I set my alarm for 5, and got Jack up at 5 and took him out before he had a chance to go in his cage.

The trainer said, "No sleeping in shifts!" He said you just cannot disrupt your lives to that degree. The dog just has to fit into the family, not the family fit to the dog.

WHAT DID THE TRAINER TELL US THAT STOPPED THE HOWLING INSTANTLY?

He said to try putting the crate in our bedroom where Jack could see us through the grate.

Never at any time does anyone in their right mind (exaggeration, admittedly) say that it is okay to LET THE DOG OUT OF THE CRATE IF IT CRIES and put it in bed. This kills your crate training and teaches the dog that screaming gets it what it wants.

The trainer wasn't against just skipping the crate and putting the dog in bed from the start IF the dog was big enough not to get squished and IF the dog wasn't going to pee in the bed. Back to the algebraic calculations, if you have that situation.

So, anyway, we put the crate where Jack could see me out of the grate, and that was IT! He went to sleep with just a few initial peeps, and slept from 9 pm to 7 am. Imagine our relief!

The only quirks: he did kind of whimper for a while at 2, so I did take him potty and he did have to pee. Then again at 4. But had I not taken him out, he might have just held it. I was too nervous to test that.

When you take a dog out of the crate to potty, just remember not to interact with the dog or make it fun. Dont talk, kiss, play around, nothing. All business. Take the pup potty. Dont talk to him. Then silently return him to his crate. This worked for Jack.

Next post, I will talk about how we potty train Jack.