Hi all! I have a miniature poodle named Betty who is just over a year old.
We bought her when she was 12 weeks old and, unlike every dog I have owned
(large dogs - Goldens, Shepherd mixes), we were quite inconsistent in the
crate training. The reason for that was when we bought her she was with us
almost 24/7 as my wife worked at home and at night she slept with us in our
bed and didn't have any accidents during the night. However, there were
ongoing occasional accidents during the night when we didn't wake up to hear
her shuffling around on the floor. Our solution was to close the bedroom
door and we usually hear her scratching to get out. However, if we don't
she'll occasionally pee in front of the door.

My wife went back to work 3 months ago and Betty had to be crated during the
day. She has not had accidents in her crate and holds it when we are home
except at night when she will occasionally have an accident if we don't wake
up (like once every 2 weeks). This isn't SO bad except for the fact that we
will find ourselves taking her out once, twice, sometimes THREE TIMES a
night. It's worse than when our children were babies! LOL

My solution is to put her travel crate in our bedroom and tolerate the
yapping until (we hope) she gets used to sleeping in there through the night
without going out. We're also going to limit her water after 8:00 p.m. at
night (we usually go to bed at around 10:00 p.m.). We'll do that for a
couple of weeks and then start leaving the door open to her kennel and
gradually giving her access to the bed again. My biggest fear is the
incessant yapping when she is in the cage keeping us awake. We'll put the
ticking alarm clock beside it but if that doesn't work and she doesn't stop
yapping after a couple of nights in there, we'll have to start relegating
she and her crate down to the basement where it won't keep us awake.

How does that plan sound? Does anyone have any other suggestions or tips?
The biggest problem here, I recognize, is my wife's in mine own guilt at
making Betty sleep in the cage when she is used to sleeping with us and
we'll have to overcome that but we'd like to permit her at some point to do
that. ;-) Thanks!

--
Shrink

"Natural gas is hemispheric. I like to call it hemispheric in nature because
it is a product that we can find in our neighborhoods."

George W. Bush, Austin, Texas 12/20/00