Nighty-night in Your Crate

Ever since we got Rudy, we would say "Go nighty-night in your crate" and he would dash to his crate in the family room and go inside. Then, with his head hanging out the door, he would wait (semi-)patiently for one of us to give him a dog biscuit and shut the door. Since we have gotten Emme, we all sleep upstairs in our bedroom on the second floor at night. We say "Time to upstairs to bed" so it sounds like a different command than go to your crate. Emme has a crate in our bedroom and Rudy sleeps on the rug.

We still have a crate for each dog downstairs and we put them in there when we both are gone out of the house during the day or early evening. Both dogs rush to their crates either when we say "Nighty-night" or even before if they see us getting on coats and boots or going to the cupboard for dog biscuits. They go in the crates willingly and eagerly.

Emme seems to understand the difference in the two commands. "Nighty-night" gets her into her crate and "To bed" gets her upstairs after she helps Ken take his pill and get dog biscuits to take upstairs with us.

Rudy is hopelessly lost. No matter which command we say, Rudy first runs for the crate. He is going to obey even if he is not sure what we want. If we don't show up within a reasonable length of time, he dashes out of the crate, locates us and runs back to the crate again. So at night when we go to bed, Rudy is in and out of the crate a few times and then up the stairs to the bedroom. We still have a little work with Rudy on figuring out these commands.