Amy,

My is ashamed of pooing in front of people as he finds it rude. He gets really really embarrassed if he has to, but if I put a towel in front of him so he can't see the people (or the people see him) he does his biz.

*My dog

(This isn't the pug btw he loves taking giant shits in front of my sister in laws feet)

My daughter has a Chihuahua/Dacshund/Jack Russell mix and that dog has been the biggest nightmare with toilet training. Evidently Dacshunds and Jack Russells both are stubborn and take about 2 years to fully toilet train. My daughter got the dog while living at her dad's, and they weren't diligent with training her when she was a puppy so now I'm trying to get her on track. It's really starting to irritate me. Especially since none of my 4 Boxers have ever had potty accidents in the house - not even the blind one who had to learn to go up and down stairs and use a doggy door! Ah the power of crate training. Hopefully, you can get Princess Aida trained quickly and you can move on to settling into a more typical existence.

Side note on having a crate in the house. It is amazing to me how many people think I'm a big meanie because I have a crate and my dog is crated when no one is home. What they don't realize is that is his comfy place. He goes in there to relax - especially if there are a lot of people in the house. Although, he likes it when my grandsons climb in there with him.

A picture a day please!

I was sure it was going to be a crested since the first time I saw Lucy's picture I thought she was a chinese crested.

And seriously, a picture a day would be FABULOUS. We all need the smiles these days.

"What worked for me yesterday, when she peed on my crossword puzzle in progress (!!) ..."

It might not be what you think. Maybe she'd figured the puzzle out, and was so frustrated at not having opposable thumbs to hold the fountain pen, that she...

OK, I'll shut up now.

LOVE, LOVE, LOVE the Blue Buffalo foods...both dogs are on it. No messy poops...yay!

Awwwww, the look of a contented sleepyhead who clearly is tired after being "spoiled" in a loving home!

"Evidently Dacshunds and Jack Russells both are stubborn and take about 2 years to fully toilet train."

I guess I lucked out. I have a 9-month-old Dachshund/Jack Russell mix, my first dog. I got him at age 5 months from some vet students who were fostering him. He was pretty well trained to pee outside with an occasional deviation and not yet trained to defecate outside. He was very amenable to training using praise/treat reward and was trained in only a couple of weeks. I did use crate training as my method. I felt that pee pads would only send the message that it was sometimes okay to go inside and might confuse him. I wanted him to get the message that he should never go inside.

Ohhhh, what a sweetie. She looks like she's using her tail to cover up her boobies. :-)

And Ppen, HA! Holding up a towel as a privacy screen for your pug to poop behind. I'm glad to see I'm not the only human who's been pug-whipped.

Sometimes I really wonder about the food chain, and what's where. Seems to me we're working for them.

I adopted my sweet little old pug lady from a puppy mill rescue when she was four years old. She has basically been potty-trained from the get-go. I feel like the biggest cheat on earth, because she has never done things like poop or pee in the house, bark, chew on things, or dig up the trash, and I never had to train her. She simply never did those things. (In Nicholas Cage voice from 'Raising Arizona') ... I got the best one.

Last night, I think she was having bad dreams. She woke me up yipping and twitching in her sleep, so I scooped my arms around her and gave her a hug. That quieted her down, and when I rolled over with my back to her, she spooned up against the back of my neck and rested her fuzzy little chin on top of my head. That's love, man. There's not a single dark corner of my frosty, cold heart that she hasn't shined her light on.

I've been reading those 'Earth's Children' books by Jean Auel, where the main character's spirit totem is a cave lion. My spirit totem is my pug. My boyfriend thinks it's hilarious and teases me about it all the time, how much alike Holly and I are.

Lizzie...I'm sending my daughter's dog to you!

My brother and his wife raise doxies and the females have always taken much longer to train than the males. My neighbor has a Jack Russell, also a female and he said it took 2 full years to train her. Maybe it's a male/female thing? I will stick to my big dogs!

Speaking of pugs, I wanted to get a pug or a Boston terrier. I love that "bug-eyed" appearance. But my dog was left at a university vet hospital because his owners couldn't afford the cost of having the foreign object obstructing him removed, and the vet students who had been fostering him since his hospital stay were about to graduate and scatter. He needed a home.

He's a sweetie, but bursting with energy and still has a propensity to swallow inedible objects. I would dial down the energy a couple of notches if I could. I was looking for a dog to lean a little more to the couch potato end of the spectrum than this one; he'd rather run, wrestle with other dogs, burrow in the grass, and play fetch.

Amy, M&Ms played a major role in my mother's toilet training method for small humans, and her kids have turned out okay. If treats work, then I say treat away! Both she and you will be happier when she's trained. She's a precious little creature -- congratulations!