I love sleep. I don’t have to sleep in, I don’t have to go bed to early. But when I’m sleeping, I’m silently so happy.  Jake loves to sleep too. I think his choices in life go: Melvin, sleeping, me.  I’m fine with that.

Then why is that Jake and I bond every night at 3am? Every night. It’s because his pee machine or the meatball factory turn on at that hour.  While dude is sleeping. He wakes up in a panic and that wakes me up and the bonding begins. I have tried EVERYTHING to move this nightly occurrence to morning or earlier in the evening. I have fed him at 10pm, 4pm, smaller evening meals. Meatballs at 3am. I have withheld water after 7pm, still there is pee at 3am. What the… Almost every night when it happens I think of the Dunkin Donut commercials: the guy who gets up at 3am and says, “time to make the donuts”.  For us, it’s crap.  Literally.

I get up, get him cleaned up, change out his bedding and do a load of laundry.  By then it’s usually 3:30.  Also by then, I’m wide awake. Jake is usually back asleep the moment the new bed hits the ground. There are some nights meatballs happen first and while I’m putting that laundry in the washer, the pee machine has ruined the new bed I just put down. Those nights I say words that would shock your soul (I say them to the night, not to Jake).

I have tried, everything.

• We tried a crib mattress so that clean-up could be quicker (just the change of a  crib sheet). He can’t sleep that flatly though, it seems his wrecked spine is most comfortable when his body is more relaxed and curled and not flat. He does better in a bolster type bed.
• I tried puppy pads on top of everything.  The first thing he does is remove them from everything or ball them up into a pillow.
• I have tried taking him out at midnight.
• As mentioned, I have tried feeding him at every hour during the day and minimizing water intake later in the eve.

I feel super strongly that he should not wear a diaper at night (and a diaper wouldn’t help with the meatballs anyway) because I don’t want him laying in a full diaper.  At least diaper-free in a bed, he can get up and move. And just in case you have a similar issue, he is gated off in a corner of the room with industrial carpet pads down and then bath mats over that (easier to wash). Gotta keep the production contained.

This is the point in this post where you can get ready to say ‘wow, she really has tried it all’. You may also gag. I even learned from the vet how you can ‘encourage’ a meatball moment to try to get him to go before bed. It involves a q-tip. Ugh. It worked once. Now he’s immune to it. I can honestly say it felt like a huge low trying to do it, but if it had worked, I would have championed the hell out of it.

So.  Any suggestions? More wine?  Yes, I agree!!!

Why do you keep chanting ‘meatball time”?  You know we do that at night.  Common woman, focus.