Make mountains from molehills! Grow your own real estate, overnight!

It is becoming more and more apparent that if this dog is going to be properly house broken, it's going to be up to me to do it. The teen makes promises, only to immediately forget them. "Look! There's something new!" Animals and kids, not an ounce of attention span amongst the world-wide lot of them.

I keep reading about a technique where you take advantage of a dog's instinct to keep its nest clean by keeping it in a crate most of the time, just letting it out to relieve itself and to play (with maximum supervision.) I'm thinking that's what I'll do, but it just seems so mean.

See, this is exactly the sort of situation where I go all girly and let my emotions override my common sense. "Poor puppy! Look he's whining. We need to let him out so he can run wild and ruin all our carpets."

Spent all evening helping the teen write a three page paper contrasting and comparing Romeo and Juliet and West Side Story. He'd write for about three seconds, then, "Look! There's something new!" Whereupon I would put on my best evil stepmother face and ask, "Where are you on that paper?" He would complain that it wasn't fair that they were only given one night to write such a long paper, and I would remind him that life isn't fair. Yes, I'm turning into my parents. Frightening, isn't it?

At one point, after he announced that he was going to do a lousy job in protest at the injustice of it all, I even told him he was "cutting off his nose to spite his face." Could I sound anymore like my father? The only thing worse would be my mother's line. "You're making a mountain out of a molehill." If I ever use that line, could someone please pour chocolate down my throat until I come to my senses again?