Pupdate

J. and I haven't gotten a decent night's sleep in a month. Not since we brought Milky home. She's an adorable puppy, but she can't yet make it through the night without going potty. We seem to be through the phase where she doesn't make a peep and just pees on our bed. We're happy about that. It's not a good feeling to roll over in bed and discover the sheets are cold and wet (or warm and wet!). Now at least she whines and gets restless, so we wake up and get a chance to take her out before she pees on our bed.

Yes, we have a crate for her. Yes, we put her in it when we leave the house or when we need her to be confined for a little while. But it's not working for us at night. The crate is downstairs, and it's way too big and heavy to be unfolding and packing up the stairs every night. And we won't put her downstairs while the rest of the family is upstairs, because we don't want to isolate her from her "pack."

So for the time being, she's on our bed. As soon as she can make it through the night without peeing, we'll be putting her in her crate for the night. Or once she's completely housebroken, we'll let her sleep wherever she wants to. Janna and Heather are already devising ways to get Milky to sleep in their bed. That's fine with us. We don't care where she sleeps, provided it's not our bed.

Before we brought her home, I was looking online for pictures of lab puppies, so I could show the girls what Milky would look like at her current age. I found someone online who breeds labs for hunting dogs. She had pictures of her puppies each week and described what they did with the puppies that week to socialize them and get them ready to be bought. One week, the breeder described introducing the puppies to birds, to see which ones had the strongest hunting instincts.

I didn't pay much attention to that when I read it.

Then yesterday I took Milky out in the backyard to go potty. Some geese were flying overhead and honking as they flew. They didn't go directly over our house, but they were about a half a block away. When they passed by, Milky heard the honking and looked up to see where it was coming from. She saw the geese, and scurried for the porch so she could go inside!

I guess she wouldn't make much of a hunting dog, huh?

Last week, she was exploring our yard and the next-door neighbor's yard. She was trotting through the grass towards their house when their dog spotted her from the back door. Their dog barked once. Milky yelped and immediately turned around and ran for the house. It was a little pathetic but very cute and endearing.

Our biggest challenge with her right now (besides housebreaking, of course) is teaching her "bite inhibition." That's the technical term for "not biting too hard." We had to do some reading online, because she was driving us crazy with her sharp little puppy teeth. And all of our arms look like we've stumbled through a briar patch. According to the websites we saw, puppies generally learn bite inhibition by playing with their littermates. If they bite too hard, the other puppy yelps, and gradually they learn to control how hard they bite. Ever since we read that, there's been a constant stream of yelps and yipes in our house.

At first it seemed to work like a gem! She wasn't biting so hard, and she seemed to be calming down also. But the last couple of days, she couldn't have cared less whether we yelped or not. That just made it more fun for her to bite us. We gotta keep working on that.

So now I tell Milky the same things I used to tell my girls: "It's a good thing you're so cute!"

I'll try to post some updated pictures soon. It's hard to get any photos of her, because if she's awake, she's running around like a crazed animal. She was sort of still the other day when I was taking her picture, but that's because she was chewing on the camera strap -- which also makes it hard to take a good picture of her. I'll keep trying.