You may remember from one of the first videos in Euchre's series that I
mentioned that her very first night home,
she actually slept six hours without getting up.
Okay. It's been six hours.
It's some sometime in the morning.
And we just had our first peep.
Now this was not by accident. In fact,
we were pretty sure this was going to happen this way in today's video.
I'm going to share with you a bunch of tricks that we use in order to help us
get our puppies to sleep through the night.
And it doesn't involve setting an alarm. I'm Kayl McCann. This is Euchre.
Welcome back to McCann Dogs.
What a lot of people don't realize is that overnight potty training actually
starts earlier in the night.
There are certain things that you can do in the evening. In the late evening,
that's going to set yourself up for success overnight.
And that first one is going to be sort of your evening prep. Now,
one of the most important things is to make sure that your puppy goes to sleep
with an empty bladder.
And there's a couple of things that you can do to ensure this happens.
Number one is think about limiting their access to water after a certain time.
Now everybody's going to be different depending on what they time they go to
bed. But for us,
we stopped letting her have access to water about after 8:00 PM or so.
And that way we knew that she didn't have any water left in her bladder.
When she went to the bathroom, she'd be pretty empty along with water.
We're also going to change or limit the access to food. And when we feed her.
Now, it's pretty common for me to train pretty late into the evening.
So when I do that, I'll only give her a limited amount of food.
And then I try to choose to use maybe a toy reward in the late evening,
instead of food so that I'm not giving her a bunch of extra stuff.
And then we try to make sure that she has a poop before we take her to her crate
for the night. Let's talk a little bit about poop dog poo specifically,
and it's actually subject,
I know quite a bit about because I've gotten pretty good at getting my dogs to
go to the bathroom before bedtime, which means I get a nice long sleep.
Now there's a trick to getting your dog to go to the bathroom.
And one of the most helpful things that you can do is get your puppy to be
active.
One of the things that I like to do later in the night with my training using
that toy is she's more energetic. I'll either play a little fetch,
a little tug of war,
or sometimes it'll just take her for a little romp around the outside of the
property, just to loosen things up.
And she's far more likely to go to the bathroom and often if I take her outside
and she doesn't go,
I find if I just walk her around for a little while before I know it,
she's she's gone to the bathroom. And that way I know that throughout the night,
she's empty. And it's very unlikely. She's going to ask to to go out again.
I have a really important question and it could change everything in terms of
your overnight potty training.
Do you know your puppy's potty schedule at this point?
Now this is something that took us a few weeks to figure out with Euchre.
One of the things that we discovered is that,
you know I'm going to talk about poop again,
but she's a double pooper in the morning. I found that I would take her outside.
She'd have her normal pee her normal poop. And I would think, woo,
we're ready to start the day and within an hour or so,
she would be looking for a place to go to the washroom once again.
And so I actually learned over time that there was certain times of day that she
is much more likely to go to go to the washroom.
And that allowed me to ensure that those times those points had been met
before we went to bed at night.
It's very common for her to have to go to one more time before we go to bed.
So if it's getting close to bedtime,
and I know she still hasn't had her her evening poop.
I'll go through some of those things on the list. I mentioned earlier about,
you know, doing a bit of training with her, maybe doing a bit of exercise,
taking her for a walk,
get those things moving so that she actually does follow her schedule,
which makes overnight much easier for the both of us.
We've talked a lot in our previous potty training videos about common times
where they do have to go things like coming out of their crate or after they had
a big nap or after they had a lot of play.
We want to take advantage of those opportunities and use it to help us make an
overnight potty training plan.
A lot of people think they have to set an alarm overnight and get up several
times to let your puppy outside.
But I'm very happy to say that you don't actually have to do that.
You have an alarm system built in right here.
And we would recommend that you keep your puppies crate nearby,
where you're sleeping, so that if they do stir,
you can hear them and then get up and take them out.
Now with a lot of the other tips that we're going to be mentioning in this
video,
hopefully you're going to be able to find that even within the first couple of
nights, your puppy will sleep for a long time.
She did whimper a little bit the first couple of nights that she was home,
but it wasn't until early in the morning that we had to get up.
And I heard her stir got up, let her out and dealt with it at that point.
But they're going to,
there's going to be a time when you don't want that to become the routine. Now,
eventually we pushed our six hour timeframe to,
she sleeps about eight hours a night, which is pretty great.
So the way that we did that, is you know,
after a few days of getting up at 6:00 AM to let her go to the washroom,
we would then push it five or 10 minutes. I might let her whimper a little bit.
I might just bang on her crate a little bit and tell her quiet, settle,
wait a few minutes for her to settle.
And then I would let her up and take her outside to go potty.
And each day I sort of push it a bit more.
And I think after the second day she fell right back asleep for another hour or
so. So it was a pretty easy transition,
but it's much easier for me to feel less guilty about letting her outside.
If I know that before she went to bed, she fully went to the bathroom.
She had good exercise. You know, I know that I've set her up for success.
So I feel less guilty about letting her out all throughout the night.
She learns to have a long, good night's sleep. And so do I. Now,
if you do have to get up in the middle of the night to have your dog go potty,
it's really important that when you take them out,
that you make sure it's all business and no pleasure. So if you come out,
your puppies are running around and being, you know, having a bit of a party,
just keep the leash a little bit shorter, just encourage them to hurry up.
We often suggest teaching our puppies to go to the bathroom on command.
I'll often tell her, hurry up, hurry up, hurry up,
and then encourage her to go from there if she's not going within a minute or
so,
I'm just going to take her back inside and put her back in her before we try it
again. But if we come out and then we do a little play,
we make it a bit of a game.
I don't want her waking me up in the middle of the night so that we can go
outside and have a little party together. So make sure it's all business.
No pleasure. Get the job done back inside, back to bed.
I'm talking a lot about structure with our puppies,
but looking down the road a little bit,
there are certain things that you might not need to worry about as your puppy
gets a little bit older. Things like restricting water throughout the night,
or you know, not feeding or playing with them at a certain time of the evening.
As your puppy gets a little bit older,
they are going to learn how to self-regulate.
And one of the ways that you're going to know that you're ready to kind of
loosen the rules a little bit is, you know,
is your puppy successfully making it overnight every single night without asking
to go outside without having any issues? You know,
are they typically doing well with their house training during the day as well?
Do they understand to hold it or to ask you to go outside?
Do they understand not to have accidents in their crate?
Can they spend a long time in their crate without needing to go outside?
These things are all going to slowly start to come together for you.
And at that point,
you can start to decide whether you want to be a little bit more relaxed with
some of those rules and structure.
If you're still struggling with your puppy potty training,
make sure you click that card right there and find out the biggest mistakes that
people make with their puppy potty training.
If you're looking for some more help and some specific advice for training your
puppy, make sure you check out our Puppy Essentials online program.
The link for that is in the description below on that note, I'm Kayl.
This is Euchre, Happy Training.