Hello all. My first post - looks a great forum! We have a 10 week old Lab x Springer who has been with us for 8 days. She is generally doing well after a very noisy first 5 nights! She now settles in her crate quite well at bedtime (after a loo at 11pm). We have been getting up in the night to let her relieve herself in the garden. We started at about 2.30am and are pushing it back each night as she has been asleep when we've got up - it's now about 3.30am. However, she is not good at settling back to sleep after the night time loo stop - she resists being placed back in her crate and then barks for an hour afterwards when I leave her. We try to keep the loo stop very calm, with no lights on and very little interaction, but she seems to be waking up and wanting to play rather than settling back to sleep. It seems to me that the more we push back the night time loo stop, the more likely it is that she will be ready for action having had more hours of sleep. So, should we just abandon the night time loo stop and see if she can make it through to 6am, or try something else? I look forward to hearing from the collective wisdom!
I would make bed time 11.30 and let her go through until 5 - it's up to you if you put her back to bed then , I just snoozed until 6-7 with mine. You can then push back (or forward?) the 5 by 10/15 mins each day or every couple of days. Hope it goes well, sounds ok so far! And welcome to the forums!
Hello and welcome to the forum from me and my two year-old lunatics, Willow and Shadow. I never had this issue with mine, but if she's struggling to settle again after being woken up, I would be tempted to wait until she wakes up herself - I assume you'll hear her waking up and be able to take her out straight away? Because she might be desperate then and you don't want her messing in her crate. Some puppies are able to get through the night from very early on, so try it one night and see what happens. You can always go back to an interim loo stop if needs be. It's a tiring time, but it does pass. Shadow now wakes us up at 7am - then falls straight back asleep on our laps once we're up. Willow often needs to be dragged from her bed around 8am. This is unless she's woken up early and started tormenting Shadow with a toy to make him play.... Tell us more about your girl. Does she have a name? We love pictures here, especially of pups! You need to use a service like Flickr, Photobucket, Imgur etc and then copy the BBCode link (which looks like a link surrounded by [ IMG]....[/IMG] tags) into your post.
Hi Fiona. Thanks for your post about this. I was hesitant to let her call out to us when she needs the loo as I thought as I'm trying not to respond to her whines and barks from the crate. I think we'll try a slightly later bedtime tonight and see if she can make the whole distance...that would be brilliant as I'm pretty exhausted! So, her name is Mossy and she's a 50/50 Labrador x Springer - all black except for white rear paws and a little spot on her chest. I'll try and figure out how to post a picture soon (when I'm not supposed to be 'working from home'!).
Hi and welcome I can't really add to advice you've had above as Harley sleeps with us (wouldn't settle in a crate at night times!). She's now 2 and sleeps 11pm-8/9am
Hello there I wouldn't risk having a pup toilet in a crate, and neither would I rely on noise to wake me (I might not wake up, or the dog might not make a noise, and anyway I don't want a dog making a noise in a crate). I didn't get up to my puppy at night at all. I left him in a pen with an area of newspapers remote from his bed, and kept the nights as short as possible. It worked out fine. My OH would do a late toilet trip and I'd do early mornings.
Julie : when you leave a puppy with crate inside playpen and papers , if it does poop , will it not mess with it? I have seen Rocky sniffing his poo few times but I take it away immeditely , hoping I do not have to find out what he would do if I let him keep sniffing
Mossy: I let him sleep , he makes noise to go out at 3 ( he is 8 weeks old) , he only wines to go out , quick pee/poo( he still poops at night, else would have used Julie's method of play pen and pads) , we get reighr back to sleep . I am a light sleeper and he sleeps well in his crate so I assumed little bit winning to go out is fine..
I didn't have this problem with my pup - actually, I always had the opposite problem with him, he always wanted to run away from his own poo asap, it was a nightmare with him on lead when he was small trying to pick it up. And he still is like this about poo belonging to other dogs. It is a good point though, if a pup shows signs of eating poo, it might be best to be sleep deprived than allow it to develop into a habit. But even so, Charlie didn't have more than one or two poos overnight before he was ok to last the very short nights. My OH would stay up until midnight (I'd go to bed at 10pm) and I'd get up at 5am - then 5.30am, 6am (Tee Hee - OH still had to stay up until midnight though....).
Morning all. Well she did great and we all slept from 11.30 - 5.30 so I'm well chuffed with that. Hopefully the middle of the night trips out to the garden are over!
I think Jane's advice is good - late nights and early mornings for a while and slowly extend it, then at least you get a chunk of sleep, if a bit shorter than ideal! The less shouting they do for any kind of attention the better. I have a pup every year (Guide Dog puppy walker) and I am too old to lose that much sleep every summer - I feel like I 'did my time' at that with my children! So I have a puppy pen with a puppy pad at night. When they are tiny OH takes them out at midnight and I get up at 5:30 then slowly extend it to 7:30am. The midnight wee stops at around 10 weeks. Twiglet (14 weeks) now goes to bed at 10pm and I get her up at 7 - 7:30. She still has the occasional wee on the pad - but that's fine by me, they all get there in the end!
Jane's advice has worked a treat, thanks. We're now getting sleep from 11.15 til 5.45am and she's doing fine. A shred of normality has returned to the house!
