Potty Training by Dog

It's interesting how various circumstances can come together and add up to one big mental billboard telling you to take action, now!  Mine says, "It's time for potty training!"

 

First of all, Samantha has discovered potty humor.  She finds the words, "burp," "fart," "pee," and "poo" just hilarious.  She doesn't find the events themselves so amusing, but say the words and you can have her rolling with laughter until she gets the hiccups.  She only says a few words yet, but "burp" ("bep") is one of them.  I swear, we didn't encourage this, but we do find it cute.

 

Next, she will finally, on occasion, agree that she needs to have her diaper changed because it is dirty, as opposed to agreeing so that she can play with my locket, stickers, the gold kitty cat, or Maria the Fish.

 

She loves to flush the toilet.

 

And lately, Sam has been very interested in watching the dog pee on bushes when we go for walks.  We hadn't "walked" the dog in months because we lived in a place where he could roam free on acres of property.  But we just moved to the DC area and we have a postage stamp yard, so he needs a daily walk.  Sam finds his potty behavior just fascinating, and she'll point and say "bah bah" which means, "what is that?"  I tell her that he's peeing, and we move on.  Of course, this is repeated about one thousand times during an average walk.

 

Today, after observing Toby do his business on the bush outside our front door, Sam walked up to the bush, turned her back on it, and squatted over it.  I asked her what she was doing but her eyes were glazed over.  Joking to Adam, I started to say, "It looks like..." but then...yes...it's not a joke, it's...yes, "SHE'S PEEING ON THE BUSH!"  I almost died with laughter.  Then I had to make quite an effort to convince her that my laughter was okay and what she did was okay.  I guess I did a good job because a few minutes later she did it again.

 

Where do you buy those little training potties, anyway?