Week 11, Home Alone

So Theo is 11 weeks old already! The time is just flying by and he is already growing up so fast! My two weeks of telecommuting for work ended and this week I'm back at work. Yesterday was my first day back and the longest that I left Theo home alone. It was terrible! Aside from missing him like crazy, he had some separation anxiety issues (or maybe just loneliness) that were not so fun to deal with.

For the next few months (however long it takes until we trust Theo to have run of the house, or at least the kitchen/family room) I'll be going home on my lunch hour (or more like two, but that's okay) to feed Theo and get him some play and exercise. Yesterday when I went home in the middle of the day I found Theo had pooped on the kitchen floor, nowhere near his puppy pad. Normally I would think this was normal. He never really took to pooping anywhere but outside, which is great, right? Except he had already pooped twice yesterday morning. Three times in 4 hours?! Yikes. The third time I attribute to the stress from separation anxiety. So I cleaned up the poop, fed him lunch, took him for a nice long walk, played with him a few minutes, and then put him back in his pen, hoping he would cock out for the rest of the afternoon. Ah, not so. When I got home in the evening I found that his entire 1.5 ft x 1.5ft puppy pad had been shredded to pieces the size of a penny...and then peed on. There were bits of the pad all over the pen, and somehow they had gotten all over the rest of the kitchen too. It was awful, and, again, something I attribute to him being stressed. Later in the evening he even ended up peeing on his dog bed, which he has never peed on before. I think he was just a hot ball of nerves yesterday.

Well today I headed home at lunch expecting to find another poopy mess. I parked on the street and snuck around back to see what he was doing. I wanted to know if he cries when I'm not there, or if he's developing chronic barking, or any of those bad habits. I needn't have worried, apparently. He was being a quiet little dream, taking a nap in his crate. When I walked in I saw that while Theo had peed and pooped, he had done both on his puppy pad! What a good boy! I'll be heading home soon and hope to find an equally happy site. I'm hoping that yesterday was just Theo getting used to being alone, and in the future he'll have a better time of it. I'll keep you posted!