Our Callie is 16 weeks old. She sleeps decently through the night until about 5 something when she wakes up and wants a potty break. After we put her back in, she doesn’t usually object and will settle in. But then no matter what she wakes up at 6am on the dot and starts crying/whining. We have been very careful not to reinforce it by ignoring it and have tried letting her cry it out but I’m kind of shocked that at this point, she’s still doing it. We’ve tried setting earlier alarms when she was younger and she did okay for a bit but we couldn’t keep getting up that early as she just refuses to sleep past 6am as soon as we worked up to it. We also have a 5 year old male lab and she’s pretty attached to him. He does not sleep in a crate. He’s a very good boy and doesn’t do anything while she cries, just ignores it too. But as soon as we let her out for the morning during a solid break in her crying, she is overjoyed and starts her morning harassment of him. I’m not sure if that’s related at all but thought it worth mentioning. I don’t recall his morning whining lasting this long.
I think at 16 weeks at 6am she is ready to start her day and she is probably hungry. She has had enough sleep, and is growing fast so needs to eat. It gets later as they get older, but we had lots of early starts until Meg got older. They are rather like kids, and don't sleep in until teenagers !
Luna used to wake up about 5.30/6 at that age as she was starving hungry, once she had breakfast and a little play she would curl back up to sleep. Now at 14 months she is up about 5/5.30 for toilet break and will sleep until she is woken up for breakfast, currently 8.30am here and she is still in bed!
Apart from setting an alarm 5 min later everyday and letting her whine until the alarm goes off, another thing we were told and that really really worked well for us is to not feed the pup as soon as they/you get up. So after you take her out of the crate, make your own coffee/breakfast first and then feed her. That way, she does not directly associate getting up and out of the crate with being fed.
