I wouldn't have responded to this post except after going through a frustrating experience with Mikee, I discovered something that finally clicked in his little sweet brain. If you read my previous "discouraged" post about how sweet little Angel at five months just naturally understood you don't wet on the living room carpet...but Mikee, who was also 100% paper trained at ten weeks, would wet wherever he happened to be in the living room. Didn't matter if he had just wet BIG TIME in the litter pan.

The breakthrough came by giving up my life for five days (mornings before work and evenings after work..I work from noon to six)and everytime he was in the living room, I drug him every ten minutes (in harness and leash)from the living room to the kitchen to the litter pan and said over and over, "Outside Mikee! Outside!" About once an hour he would wet a little on the paper and I would not just praise him, I would say in a high excited voice, "Outside, Mikee! Outside Mikee! YEA!!!! (and this is the part he really liked...I would clap my hands about ten times very fast while I was saying YEA!) He would look up and me and smile and jump up and down...and he was almost as happy as I was. I would then say, "Mikee, want a carrot?" (his favorite treat in all the world)and he would "dance" on his back feet all the way to the counter for his reward. He would even go back to the litter pan and walk across the paper to see if that would get him another carrot! That's when I knew HE GOT IT!

It's been three weeks now and he is still going - on his own - to the kitchen to the litter pan without any mistakes in the living room. The most difficult part of this was not to reward Angel when she didn't go and not to reward Mikee when he didn't go. They discovered they each had to produce the goods to get the goods. Talk about being worn out...training two at the same time! The funniest thing to come out of this is, when one of them goes to the kitchen to use the litter pan, the other one heads for the kitchen because they know it's "party time"!

Now, about keeping the areas clean where he had gone before. I don't think you can ever get all the urine odor eliminated, so everytime he or Angel go near those areas, I get the TV guide out, hit my hand with it, and yell NO! once, loudly, and they leave that area. They seem to understand this is not carrot territory! Good luck, and let me know how it goes with your sweet little Ellie. Mikee GOT IT on his seven-month birthday. I was so happy as I had heard all the horror stories about "how little boys mark their territory and are impossible to train". Mikee proved them wrong! YEA Mikee!!!
Annette