Puppy Questions

[Debbie Schneider]

Hi - my little Australian labradoodle will be 15 weeks in 4 days and I have having some issues with having a puppy and working outside the home.  We own our own glass business and I do the bookwork and I have to go to our office from noon to five Mon-Fri.  We have had our puppy for almost 5 weeks now and I purchased a larger all open crate that sits on my desk all the time.  I try and play with my doodle lots in the mornings to tire him out and then I bring him to work with me.  I put him in his crate and he usually sleeps well until about 2:30 or so and then he wakes up.  At that time sometimes I am alone in our shop so I can have to open the front door and take him out to a gravelly area just outside our door so he can pee.  Sometimes when I am out there waiting for him to pee the phone will ring so I have to pick him up and run back in to grab the phone and then try again or a customer can also come in just when he wakes up and I am helping a customer he will then start to whine very loudly - so I close my office room door - and it helps so we don't hear the whining as loud.  Sometimes I am lucky and one of our workmen are in the shop when he wakes up so I can take him for a quick 5 min. walk - there is no grass in our area and it is a very busy street so he doesn't do well on those 5 min. walks and sometimes will not even go pee.  I bring along a kong filled with his food and some treats mixed in so that will keep him busy for half an hour or so after he goes out and sometimes he will go back to sleep until about 4 and sometimes he is just restless and will whine.  Now that it is very hot outside - it is even harder to take him for his 2:30 pee as the cement is so so hot.  I was wondering if it would be okay to leave him in an enclosed area in my kitchen (I have lots of those wire type fence things to make an area in my kitchen) and leave him alone for 5 hours.  I worry because I am trying to be so good with the housetraining - always watching him when I am home and for the most part he is doing quite well (or I guess I am doing quite well in getting him outside to potty enough times that he doesn't really get the chance to mess in the house) anyways I have left him for 3 hours and he didn't make a mess in his enclosed area in the house but I wonder if 5 hours is too long.  It is really hard for me to work properly with him beside me on my desk - it did work well for the first couple of weeks but now it is not working well at all.  What do you think and have any other of you had to do this as well - I am most worried about his housetraining - I don't want him to go potty during that 5 hours every day and then start to think it is now okay to go in the house - he will see that nothing happens when he goes in the house as I would not be able to get mad at him once I got home.  Any thoughts or advice would be greatly appreciated - this is my hardest area of owning my dog - I am about 4 years away from retirement and maybe should have waited until I was retired to get a puppy but hoping I can make it work still.  Thanks

[Debbie Schneider]

Thank you for your reply.  I have asked our elderly neighbor lady who is also a dog owner to see if she could come in mid afternoon to let Maxwell out for a potty break and she said she would love to help out so we may start on Monday - I still want to try and bring him to work a couple of days a week as I would love to be able to bring him every day as I am lucky enough to be able to bring him - but he has to be quiet  (if only he could understand that)  but maybe with some persistence he may settle down and get used to the daily routine of being in my office for afternoons.  I will try and play him out in the mornings more as well so he is good and tired when I head to work and hopefully I can get at least 3 hours of him sleeping.  Will see how it goes.  Thanks again for your reply. 

[Kurt Gustafson]

If your pup is that small, have you tried a litter box? When we had our litter of standard sized doodle pups, we had them litter trained before we moved them to going outside. We just used a large storage tub with the paper pellets (this was for an entire litter).