Well, providing puppy pads inside your house is encouraging your dog to urinate in the house...so you are defeating your training techniques. Take your pup outside every 3 to 4 hours preferrably not in your back yard but a little walk around the front of your home. If you insist on the backyard, just keep taking her out, but you need to be there with her, when she does pee, give her the command to pp outside or whatever you choose to say and praise her as though she has just given you a bag with a million dollars in it. Wait until she pees before bringing her in. This can be tedious at first but it is the fastest way to train them. In the future you can actually ask them if they need to go out and they will respond.
She is still pretty young, and her bladder signals are going to be immediate - she will not always get that her bladder is full while she is playing - it will come on all of a sudden. Be patient - keep up taking her outside and hanging out with her, in my experience this training can have your pup potty trained completely in a week depending on the dog. Later on you can take your dogs for leash walks around the block for pp time, it provides much more stimulation than the backyard - and some dogs dont like going in their own yards...Good luck.

I too have a new puppy (a stray we found that was about 4 weeks old when we brought him home). It's been about 3 weeks now and he has gotten better, but not completely. I am home during the day, so I take him out every few hours. there are NO puppy pads in the house. He does the same thing you are describing, goes outside pees sometime even a few times and then back inside and way (at least my my assertion) before he should have to pee again, he goes!!

He also only occasionally asks to go outside. We have tried taking up the water from inside that the dogs drink, and have water outside. But this doesn't seem to be the only factor (no difference with it available vs unavailable)

He knows when he has done bad, so what gives in this situation? impulsive bladder? too much water?

Thank you for the responses....Mazer, I have trained the first 2 dogs in the manner that you recommend and it was very successful. This new little one is for my 12 yr old and she keeps her in her room with her at night and this is when the puppy pads came in. Kaitlyn gets up with her pup at night to let her potty but she will not take her outside because she is afraid so we got the pads to help the child train her pup not realizing that it would create this problem.

Also, our older dog Jenna, the golden, has taken over the mother role and I think that is is also counter productive to training because the pup looks up to her as her mother. Just this morning I gave Jenna a treat and she turned around and gave it to the puppy like she was providing for her.

I think that we will need to start taking the pup outside without the older dog and see if we better results...also not being able to do the stairs is a proble. My husband said that he is going to put a ramp down the stairs (only 2 steps) and see if she will use that. She is a spunky little thing with quite the character and very smart and so far we have not seen any sign that she is afraid of anything.....it is almost as though she is looking at the golden for reasurance...if Jenna doesn't react to the situation then I shouldn't either, and Jenna doesn't react to much..not even loud noises or thunder storms, she is very relaxed.

I will suggest to my husband that he remove the pads from the main floor and take Mollie outside without Jenna and see how that goes.

thank you