Puppy = Crazy-making

[wordinista]

I love my puppy.  I do.  I love my puppy.  He is cute and sweet and smart and... was so close to being dealt a crushing blow from my smiting stick this morning.  So he's lucky he's cute.  Because, seriously.  I was conjugating the verb "to smite" this morning.

Hokay.  So y'all  know I've had a couple of crazy sleep-deprived nights.  Thursday and Friday, I really wasn't around a whole lot.  Or, at least, I wasn't around as much as Darwin would like.  He went into his crate fine Friday night and slept until, okay, six in the morning, which was not as late as I would have liked, but whatever.  Saturday was nice.  It was rainy and cruddy, and I caught a few mini-coma naps on the couch.  It wasn't Darwin's most active day, no, but he's had low-energy days before -- we just can't have too many of them strung together, or he starts getting twitchy.

Last night, at around 11:30, I put him in his crate and went to bed.

Cue the crazy effing insane howling, barking, whimpering, and whining.  Yes, he pulled the "Chewbacca howl" out of his repertoire, too.  And he?  Would not stop.

So I'm like, "Okay, whatever.  Maybe he has to pee."  I got up, let him out of the crate, snapped on the leash, and took him out.  Whammo, blammo -- the puppy had to pee.  Great.  Inside we go, and back into the crate.  I go back to bed.

But the noise?  The noise, it did not stop. 

Now, what you're supposed to do in situations such as these is ignore the puppydog, who will eventually figure out that making noise is not the way to go about getting what he wants.  But that worked about as well as trying to light a match in a hurricane.  Eventually he fell into a pattern -- sleep for twenty minutes, howl for ten.

At two thirty, this started getting real old.  And my iPod had no charge on it, so I couldn't even put the earbuds in to block him out. So I got up and did something mean:  I moved the crate to the other end of the house.  And then I went back to bed.  And slept until seven. 

Today he's been nothing but sweet and well-behaved.  We went for a super-long walk this morning, and I expect we'll be going for another super-long walk this afternoon, because I need to tire his fuzzy ass out.  As it is, he's dragging -- his internal clock has got to be all screwed up now, particularly after staying up all night, howling.  But I am not going through this craziness again -- I crate trained him once.  Once was enough.

Yeeeah.  I think I'm going to get some shorts on and take Senor Fuzzypants out for another walk.

(On an up-side, two months of having a puppy has had a positive effect on my waistline.  I noticed yesterday that a pair of pants that has always been a little snug was snug no more!  W00t!)

Comments

[tatertott.livejournal.com]

blargh - crate training can be absolutely NO FUN sometimes. I've been lucky that Rugby has only whimpered for maybe 10 minutes tops so far (granted, he's only been here a whopping grand total of 3 days...) after being put in his crate.

[miyun.livejournal.com]

Ohnoes! ohman don't I know that frequency of howling. Eek! The dogs that stay in the backyard has this habit when someone comes home or gets too close to the yard. One would start howling and the rest just goes crazy and join in. Arhg! So we usually have to do a quick-time dash down the stairs and or unlock the front door, run through the house and shush them. And then there was that time we had to deal with Cookie when she had puppies. She would howl all through the night and scratch at the door. Oh gods, you can just imagine the paint peeling off. @_@

Yep, they're lucky they're all cute! XD

Yey for smaller waistline ~ Wheeeee!

[darkfrog24.livejournal.com]

I congratulate you on the triumph of pants!