[Dailydrool] Need some two-level home advice

[Nicole Haase]

I'm aware I brought this on myself when I purchased a two level home with
an old man hound who can't do the stairs, but I'm 31 and couldn't imagine
making a house buying decision based on my 12-ish year old hound. Silly
me.

Anyway, Flash is my old guy and he is not liking us sleeping upstairs while
he's downstairs. Sometimes. We've been in the house a little over a week
and he's woken up overnight with whining, crying and barking about 3 times.
This is actually more frustrating than every night because it feels
arbitrary. There are nights he's clearly fine and then all of the sudden
the next night he gets all worked up. It also doesn't start right when we
head to bed. We usually go upstairs between 10 and 11 pm. He wakes us up
between 2 and 3 am. My guess is he wakes up and feels alone and disoriented
in a dark house in the middle of the night.

The first two times we treated it as sleep-training a child, knowing that
if we went downstairs and responded to him, we were reinforcing the
behavior. However, there's a limit to how little sleep we can get, so last
night I gave up and ended up sleeping on the couch for the rest of the
night.

Clearly we cannot keep this up. My boyfriend was looking into a dog
stretcher for carrying the lump upstairs, but that to me is a last case
scenario. We don't wake up at the same time and sometimes the hounds as to
go outside in the middle of the night. We'd spend a lot of time traipsing
the stairs and creating even more of a Diva.

He's a burrower and always wants to be covered in blankets. We make sure
he's on a dog bed and covered in blankets before we head upstairs, so we
know he's comfortable. He wears t-shirts for an overly itchy, bald belly,
so I'm not sure if a Thundershirt would be much different and provide any
comfort. He really isn't getting worked up during the day/evening when we
go upstairs without him and it hasn't happened at all with us being in the
basement. It's pretty much only overnight.

Tonight the plan is to leave a small lamp on and maybe the TV so he doesn't
feel so alone.

Do any of you have any other suggestions for how to make him feel
comfortable? My and my REM cycle are at our wits end.

Thanks and drool to those in need!

Nicole with Flash and Betsy
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