Hi!

We brought our gorgeous dorgi home 2 weeks ago, and she is 11 weeks now. She’s settling in great (apart from the shark teeth - ouch!) and she sleeps in her crate overnight.

We have a bit of a changing schedule due to work though, so she isn’t on a consistent bedtime or wake time?

3 nights a week, I work and get home at 11.30pm so she is let out then and put to bed. She sleeps in till about 7 on these days.

4 days a week, my husband leaves the house at 5.45am and she is taken out for potty before he goes and then is put back to bed in her pen.

The issue is - when I’m not working and he’s not working - what time do we get her up? Should we be setting an alarm to get her up early? We try and get her to bed around 10.45/11pm but not sure if we should be waking up early for her or just wait for her to start yelling for us? She’s downstairs so I have a monitor that alerts us when shes making a noise. I’ve set an alarm for 6am when my husband isn’t working but I don’t actually know if we are just waking her up when she would sleep in!

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    parent

  • I say stick to your current schedule +/- 30mins for consistency. We did potty breaks at 10pm(before bed), around 4/5am and 8am (when the pup wakes up).

    parent

  • I stick to the schedule everyday regardless, which totally sucks because I wake up at 4:30 to get ready for work, and our pup is up at 5:30AM.

    Weekends can be brutal, but I had to match my work rhythm until my pup was older as he was kind of destructive when he was young. While we still wake him up at 5:30 at 7 months old, his schedule has literally matched my work schedule.

    5:30-7AM - Up 7:00-1:20PM - Sleep 1:20-2PM - Up 2:00-4PM - Sleep 4:00-5:30PM - Up 5:30-9:15PM - Sleep 9:15-10:15PM - Up

    We are actually seeing that his 1:20PM session isn’t needed as he is groggy as heck, and are working to consolidate that session overall.

    I just never changed it unless I had to. All I know is that it worked. Haha. Nowadays if I need him to sleep through the afternoons, I have the ability to extend his early afternoon sessions.

    parent

  • With that breed, you'll be lucky if you ever sleep again.

    parent