It can be very disheartening to struggle through sleepless nights with a little puppy.
It is all too easy to wonder if you are doing it all wrong, and to lose your sense of proportion as sleep deprivation kicks in.
Puppies are all different
A few puppies sleep through the night from the minute they arrive in their new home. But they usually belong to someone else!
Like most new puppies Rachael woke several times during her first night with us. Here is what we did
Bedtime!
The door to Rachael’s crate had been open for much of the afternoon and evening.[wp_ad_camp_1]But at 10pm, I woke the sleeping puppy and took her out into the garden with me, walking around with her trotting after me, until she had had a wee.
I then put her back in her crate, shut the door, switched off the light and left the room. She went off to sleep surprisingly quickly, maybe ten minutes or so of intermittent whining. And we went up to bed soon afterwards.
Night-time bladder control
Most puppies (not all) do need a wee during the night for a week or two after they are eight weeks old. Sometimes for longer. If they are crated you therefore need to let them out part way through the night or they will howl to be released, and wet the bed if you don’t get there in time. Obviously it is better to pre-empt this urgent issue by getting the puppy up before it needs a wee. This also helps to prevent the puppy being ‘rewarded’ for yelling at night.
Another option of course is to leave the crate open at night, and put newspaper down in the puppy’s room, but I would prefer to avoid this if possible.
Pre-empting plans
I therefore set my alarm for 3am, by which time Rachael would have been in the crate for four hours. Most puppies can go a lot longer at night without a wee, than they can during the day. And during the afternoon and evening, I reckoned that Rachael was doing around one wee per hour. Quite good for her age. So four hours should be about right.
However, we were awoken at half past midnight to the sound of urgent cries. I went downstairs and let the puppy out into the garden where she did a wee. Then popped her back to bed.
She cried for a while and eventually went off to sleep. It took me a little while longer to get off to sleep myself, meanwhile I had forgotten that I had set my alarm for 3am! Off it went, and I re-set it for 4:30. Another half hour or so to get back off to sleep and Rachael was awake and yelling again before the alarm.
Hope for better luck tomorrow!
My attempts to ‘pre-empt’ Rachael’s cries were clearly a bit of a failure, as each time she awoke before my alarm went off. Hopefully tomorrow night I will have more success!
I am keeping a record of how we progress in our ‘quest for sleep’ over the first few weeks with a new puppy in the house. I hope it may be of some help to other puppy owners.
We may be lucky, and we may not. Experience helps, but some pups are a lot easier to settle and keep happy at night than others.
Read the next instalment of Rachael’s Journey here: Day two Rachael’s first vaccination
If you enjoy my articles, you might like my new book: The Happy Puppy Handbook – a definitive guide to early puppy care and training.