Second Floor Discovery

Emme is in love with the second floor. Every chance she gets she dashes up the stairs to sniff around. I decided earlier this afternoon to let her come to my sewing room with me while I read my email. Mistake. She sniffed around on the floor and than dashed out into the hall carrying something in her mouth. I followed her to the first floor and retrieved a little felt disk that goes on my sewing machine under a spool of thread. It must have fallen on the rug when I removed some thread and she found that in a nanosecond. So Emme is resting in her crate in the kitchen while I read my email. She doesn’t miss anything and my sewing room is just too full of temptations.

House breaking is going more slowly than I would like. Emme is 100 per cent perfect in her crate but she continues to have occasional accidents in the house. Sometimes she will go a week between mistakes and other times, we will find a little pile of doodles or a wet spot on the rug on a daily basis. I am not sure what the deal is. I have read that Bichons are notoriously difficult to housebreak but I was sure that I would have no problem. I have housebroken puppies successfully in the past and I am pretty good about getting Emme outside on a regular basis. When she has accidents in the house, sometimes I think she chooses to go on the rug. I am sure that she knows that she should not be doing it because she runs and hides and does it somewhere where we can’t see her. Last night she was out of her crate while we ate dinner. She must have found a minute or two when I was not watching her because when we cleaned up after dinner, I walked out into the laundry room with a bag of garbage and on the floor in front of the dryer were doodles. She had been outside right before we ate but she must have things saved up. She is so good most of the time, I am sure she is getting the idea. But she still is not reliable. I read that a dog is not housebroken until there have been no accidents for 12 weeks. I may be a really old lady before that happens.