I was going to post this elsewhere, but I figured more people would read it here, and maybe someone would have some advice. The bottom line is that Tia barks at night and my husband and I aren't getting any sleep.
Background: Tia is almost 5 months old, and she is locked in her crate at night for bedtime, and during the day when neither my husband and I are home.
I work during the day, and my husband works some daytime, but mostly evening shifts. During the day, Tia is never in her crate longer than 5-6 hours, and she is capable of "holding it" through the night.
After I've put her to bed at night, my husband will come home 1-3 hours later and let her out again for a bit.
At first she used to whimper at being locked up...10 minutes max, no biggie and totally expected, but lately (in the past couple of weeks) she's taken to barking non stop for an hour after putting her to bed. If she was quiet and then started barking I would go check on her to see if she had to go potty...but most of the time, she just wants to get out and be with us.
I make sure she gets plenty of exercise when I'm with her (I try to tire her out purposely). A couple of times We've decided to let her out at night and she would curl up in our room, but I still don't trust her 100% to be potty trained (My next step is to get her bell trained).
Has anyone been through this? I don't want to spoil her to have free roam of the house at night (and most certainly not during the day...she's still chewing things)...but we really need our sleep. If we just ignore her, she goes on for an hour (that's when I usually give up and go check on her in case something's wrong).
For those of you who don't crate at night, how old were your babies when you first started doing this? Are there any tips for calming her down at night? It sucks that we've regressed
Any thoughts would be welcome.
Thanks