Here are the facts:

Ebony is nearly 6 months (5 months and 2 weeks). I have read that at 6 months we should start giving her her meals twice a day instead of 3 times.

So she tends to have her breakfast at 9am and her dinner at 5:30. For the past couple of days she has been waking us up at 4-5am to go out for a wee and a poo. Before she managed to go through from 10:30-11ish pm to about 6:30-7am.

I'm guessing we've co*ked up with the meal timings? Or do you think at this age she could "hold it in" till 6:30 and we are jumping at her beck and call.

Any advice appreciated... would be nice to have some sort of pattern in place.

For your info....she is a little'ish dog..a shih tzu cross and is about 5kg

__________________

My lab was going thru the night from about 14 weeks but dont know if thats normal or not. However she went thru a phase of getting me up at 4am as thats when our baby used to wake up and she got into the habit of it. We soon put a stop to that I can tell you!!!

If it continues I think I'm going to ignore her and see what presents we have awaiting that morning. She may just roll back to sleep. I guess its trial and error. We are thinking of re-introducing a crate though.

__________________

At 5 mths old, Boo is still in a crate at night which makes me feel a bit mean but we don't have any accidents and she lasts from 1030pm to 7am quite happily. Her last feed of 3 is at ca 6pm (sometimes she still gets a little later if she has been racing around but usually not).

If Boo wasn't crated, we wouldn't have to worry about letting her out in the early hours because the door & floors would have been eaten and subsidence caused us to fall out of the bedroom window; only to wake up on the lawn with Boo peeing on us ...or worse...