Tuesday's Time Waster - Housebreaking a Puppy

Make My Monday was to be about my puppy adoption. However, I spent the day monitoring my puppy for potty break signs. We were not completely successful in avoiding the "pee and poop on the carpet" situation, but I managed to get him to poop on the pee pad the last poop of the day. And this morning he peed and pooped outside...yay! I adopted my Bichon/Maltese mix puppy on Sunday afternoon and am still deciding on a name (I'll show the list at the end). He's very cute and quite affectionate. He does whine when I put him in the bathroom to hopefully use the pee pad. He also spent most of Sunday night whining from the crate, so Monday I was very very tired and not up to squeezing in a blog post between potty breaks. He still whined last night, but not as much, so I got a bit more sleep. No wonder it's best to have two parents when raising babies. Of course, I don't care what the genders are of the parents, but two has got to be better than one...lol.

Anyway, he mostly plays for a little while and then sleeps for awhile. Then we go for a walk to hopefully pee and poop outside. He ate pretty good yesterday morning, but seemed uninterested this morning. I hope he's not catching on to my own lack of appetite, that would not be good. He does stay pretty hydrated and now goes to the water dish on his own. I'm hoping to get him potty trained before I have to work regular hours again later in August. I have a rather large bathroom given the size of my condo, so that will be his play area when I'm away from home. I'm going to start leaving for an hour or two at a time so he can get used to being alone for part of the day. I put a radio in the bathroom for company. I also plan to go for dog training lessons with him when the next class starts, so hopefully I will be able to litter box train him. Once he's completely potty trained I'll experiment with letting him have access to the rest of the condo (well probably not my bedroom or the utility room).

So here are the names I'm considering:

Tucker (it goes well with my last name and he kinda looks like a Tucker)
Buck (short for Buckeye, since I'm an Ohio State grad and a couple friends like it)
Toro (he was born in May and is a Taurus)

These were the other names I considered but not really fitting him:

Spike (cause one of the guys at the office thought it would be funny to name a fluff ball that)
Ziggy (short for Sigmund, as in Freud, since I'm a psychologist and Freud was also Taurus)
Rashi (saw this name mentioned in some stuff on alternate astrology stuff)
Heath (as in Ledger who was Taurus as is The Joker...go figure)
Malty (he's half Maltese)
Morty (saw the name Mort mentioned in relation to bulls...the Taurus sign)
Jack (cause it sounded short and sweet...but actually pretty common for dogs)

At this point, I'm probably going to go with Tucker. Since I have to schedule a well puppy check for this week, I think I'll have to pick a name pretty quick...like today. In the meantime, he's been napping for over an hour so I think it's time for a walk and potty break. Of course, he's going in the bathroom while I change out of my jammies (6am walk with a jacket on did not require changing). I'll have a picture up as soon as I deal with everything else.

UPDATE: Turned out the vet had a cancellation, so I took Tucker in for his first exam. He possibly may have a minor bacteria, so he sent us home with an antibiotic. He also sent us home with a heartworm medication which is taken once a month during mosquito season (May through October). I also chatted with the dog trainer they have on site and he gave me some potty training suggestions. One being that I should get him trained on just one way to use the potty...box or outside. Given that I live in a condo and don't have a patio that would be safe for a dog this size, I ended up buying a doggie litter box. The other suggestion was to keep him in the crate for 20 mintues and then on a leash for 20 minutes. That seems like a pretty frequent change and he's able to handle the crate longer after the intial whining, so I may go an hour on leash and an 30 minutes in the crate. We'll see how that goes and I'll call the trainer back to see when he's doing classes also.