Adjusting

We continue to have good quiet nights with Emme sleeping through the night. In one of the gazillion puppy books I read before I got Emme, they said the best way to set up the sleep arrangement was to put the puppy in a crate right next to your bed. That way, if she fussed, you could lean over and comfort her without taking her out of her crate and she would learn to sleep quietly. This has seemed to work, although she never fusses when she is put to bed. The very first night, she whined for two or three minutes and then settled down. Since then, she just settles down and goes to sleep as soon as we go upstairs. I was concerned as we were getting ready to bring the puppy home that Rudy would feel left out if she was sleeping in our bedroom. I didn’t want him to think that he was being replaced by a puppy, that the three of us were going upstairs to bed and he was being left alone in the crate in the living room. So about two weeks before we got the puppy, we began bringing Rudy into our bedroom to sleep on the floor by the bed. He adjusted to that with no problem, so now all four of us go upstairs to bed, the puppy in her crate by my side of the bed, Rudy on the floor and Ken and me in bed. Everyone goes right to sleep and if one of us has to get up to use the bathroom, the dogs continue to sleep. It is working very well.

Emme seems to recognize two words reliably: eat and inside. When it is meal time, I rattle her kibble in the dish and say “eat” I don’t know if she is reacting to the rattle or the word, but she knows what is coming. When we are outside and she is finished her business I tell her it is time to go “inside” At that point she dashes for the porch steps. We are not having as much luck with “sit.” We practice every day, but she still jumps, barks, lays down, stands, or maybe sits at that command. This will still take a little time. When I am working in the kitchen and Rudy is doing a “down/stay” she also will lay on the kitchen floor. However, her attention span is quite short and she is up and down twenty times in a fifteen minute period. When I see her laying down I tell her “Good down/stay” so maybe she will begin to associate the position with the phrase, but I haven’t tried to get her to go down on command. I want to teach her sit first and I don’t want to confuse things by teaching her two new commands at once. It will all come in time. She is bright and I don’t think it will take her long to learn many things.