Starting afresh....starting over

Today is a big day in the little, suburban life of the Stewart's.  Adam is on his third day of wearing undies for at least part of the day.  I don't mind taking potty training slowly with him.  He is interested so we're going with it.  I do; however, mind very much how long it's taking Rags to become housetrained.  We've tried several tactics and he fooled me into believing that he was starting to "get it" since he hadn't messed in the house more than once in about 3 weeks.  He proved me wrong yesterday though when he peed in the house twice without even batting an eye.  I helped raise plenty of puppies in my youth and did a fine job, if I do say so myself, with housetraining Rosko in only one week.  I don't, apparently, know just how to housetrain a dog with three young people in the house.  So, today we are starting anew.  I am refreshed and ready to charge back into battle.  I stayed up researching until 10:30 last night (pretty late for me!) and I am going to change tactics from having Rags ring a bell on the door (obviously the dummy is not getting it) to having him bark to indicate he wants to go outside.  I found a great website last night by a guy who has bred, raised, and trained German Shepards for years.  He insists on crate training, which I wholeheartedly endorse, and also on training your dog to bark when they want to go outside.  This morning started off great.  I let Rags out of his kennel and excitedly skipped down the hall to the back door.  I asked him in an excited voice, "Do you wanna go outside?!" knowing full well he really had to go since he'd been in the kennel for almost 9 hours.  I kept asking and asking in a sing song voice until he got so excited that he barked at me.  I cried, "Gooood boy!" and opened the door and ran outside with him.  Per the Internet guys suggestion, I watched Rags go potty and then yelled, "Good outside!"  Supposedly after about 100 iterations of this, dopey Rags will understand the connection between barking to "go outside" and then being told "good outside".  So, little Adam is starting afresh and Rags is starting anew.

In other news, I am about to run out the door to meet some girlfriends for breakfast and then enjoy the morning showing of "Eclipse" together (I heard it wasn't that good but it will be fun with these friends).  Deanna took the kids today and they are staying home with Stu tomorrow.  Since her son, Riley, has a baseball game early tonight and the kids have been asking to attend a game, she asked (ASKED!) if she could keep all three kids for dinner and take them to the game and drop them off at 7:00 tonight.  So glorious!  And, as luck would have it, it must have been meant to be because my boss e-mailed us yesterday letting us know her husband couldn't use their season tickets for the Twins game this afternoon.  Since I am childless this afternoon and Stu just has a scrimmage this morning, we could go!  I have been thinking about how I was going to finagle seeing a Twins game in the new stadium this summer.  And today's weather is supposed to be picture perfect!  What a blessed day!