There is a book titled "Apologizing To Dogs" by Joe Coomer (one of my favorite authors). I couldn't help thinking about that book this morning when I came downstairs to (literally) apologize to Savannah. I totally lost it last night when she wouldn't quit barking. After two nights of very little sleep because of a lot of barking, I had just about had it with being a puppy-momma at 3:00 in the morning when a certain puppy couldn't seem to stop barking at a train going by in the next town. And who knew there were so many trains over there on any given night anyway? Those trains are about 15 miles away and my husband and I have become immune to them since moving out here six years ago. We barely hear the night trains anymore, and hardly ever hear the day-time trains, and Savannah has never barked at the train whistles during the day. The howling of the coyotes after the train whistles during the night may have something to do with her response to those trains.
In the middle of that second sleepless night, Savannah was not in her crate... I'd left her in the kitchen and breakfast room, free to sleep wherever she wanted to, with the idea that maybe she wouldn't bark so much if she wasn't confined. Well, think again. She barked even more. And I had even moved her crate into her favorite corner of the breakfast room... she was always napping in that particular spot so I thought having the crate there would be better than where it was in the kitchen.
On my last trip down those stairs, after listening to countless barks and roars from this innocent and sleepless puppy, I got Savannah by the collar and that blue monkey by the tail and I put them both in the crate and slammed that door and locked it and stormed back up those stairs without looking back. When I got to the top of the stairs, I heard one last bark and then all was quiet until 6:45 when the sun was starting to come up.
Savannah was quiet in her crate when I got downstairs this morning. She didn't even lift her head from her blanket when she saw me walking into the breakfast room. As usual, her blue monkey was under her chin, in its usual role as either a pillow or companion. Before I opened the latch on that crate, I told Savannah that I was sorry and there was no excuse for my behavior other than two nights without much sleep was just two nights too much. Savannah just looked at me with those big Pyrenees eyes of hers, and even with the door to the crate open wide, she just stayed right where she was and didn't come out of there until I was ready to take her outside. Then she walked out of that crate in slow motion, stretching so completely that you would think she had spent the night in a shoe-box. Puppy guilt at its finest.
For most of the morning, Savannah wouldn't look at me even when I was talking to her. That slight tilt of her head which brought her eyes to see my shoulder instead of my face was proof enough that the quick pushing and pulling of her puppy body into that crate and then the slamming of the little door last night was more than what this puppy deserved for excessive barking.
And heaven only knows why she was really barking in the first place. We'll never know, unless and until we can read Savannah's puppy mind. However, Gary and I do need to sleep in this house, and we do need a quiet house in which to sleep. And we do want Savannah to sleep as well--- to sleep during the night, not during the day because she is exhausted from barking through half the night. And the craziest part of this is that during her first week here, Savannah slept quietly all night long, not waking up until I walked into the kitchen in the morning. I was in puppy heaven during those first days and I remember thinking how lucky I was not to be going through late-night puppy nonsense.
During the second sleepless night, my husband got on the computer and looked up articles about barking puppies and dogs.... and now we have a plan. Savannah will continue to sleep inside her crate at night, and not have run of the kitchen and breakfast room until she's no longer a puppy. If she starts barking after she's in that crate and I am upstairs, I am not (NOT) going to come back down those stairs and turn on the porch lights to see what big bad monster train is outside in our backyard.
My husband and I may have to put our heads under the covers and under the pillows to drown out Savannah's barking roars, and we figure it might take her between ten and thirty minutes to convince herself that play-time is over, night-time is for sleeping, and she can bark all she wants and no one is coming back down those stairs till the morning.
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