Paw Prints

Our Atti Poo is doing better. The jumping on the bed has stopped! We're trying the "ignore him until he calms down" when we get home and it's working wonders!! He calms down quickly and isn't jumping on us as much. We've had him a little over a month now and I've learned a lot from our little Pound Puppy.

1: No matter how often I clean the floor, it's never going to be clean ever again. :) There will always be hair...everywhere. And there WILL be paw prints on the back door. (And this is major growth!! I'm a little bit OCD!)
2: He loves us no matter what. We can punish and we can fuss but he loves us still.
3: Dogs WILL pee where they sleep. Our first week with Atticus, we had him sleep in a crate in our bedroom. Everyone says "crate trained dogs are happy dogs!". Yeah, not ours! No matter how many times we praised him, he acted like we were torturing him every time we put him in it. One night he cried so we let him out to go to the restroom but put him right back in when he was done. So the next night (4am to be exact) we woke up to him peeing in his crate. No warning, no whining - just peeing. Lovely! So he hasn't slept in it since. He sleeps fine on the floor and hasn't had any accidents since. People also told us "Dogs won't go to the bathroom where they sleep." LIES!! All lies!! Either that or we found the one exception to the rule, which let's face it - with my luck, that's probably it. :)
4: He loves to dig. Not dig out!! Just dig. He keeps 'relocating' his bone so the backyard looks like we have a Ground Squirrel infestation. :) 11pm one night we let him out before bed. He's outside for a long time so I look out the window and he's just a digging in the middle of the yard. I tell Daniel he can't come in the house with those dirty paws!! So my loving husband throws on some shoes, grabs a towel and heads out. (I can tell from the look on his face that he's repeating "I love my wife, I love my wife" over and over again in his head.) So while my husband is attempting to clean his dirty feet, I go out to investigate the hole. Well, Atti freaks out and comes to save his bone from discovery. He grabs the bone and spends the next five minutes running circles around the yard. So Daniel and I are trying not to wake the neighbors while convincing our dog that it's time for bed. I love my husband. He hasn't fussed once about cleaning the dogs little dirty paws. :)
5: Atticus gets car sick....every time. We've tried not feeding him - no good. We tried medicating him - kind of helped, he made it in to the house before he spewed. :) And I'm not sure what our beloved dog endured before he came to us but he's terrified of his brush as well.
6: We love him. He makes us nuts and he's underfoot all the time. He tore up my doormat and our fountain cover. But we think he's pretty awesome and we love coming home to him.

He really is a good dog. I make it sound horrible but he's mostly a well behaved dog. We're the ones that require training. :)

Until next time....