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Calathea

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  1. Hi all, Months later, but I just wanted to update in case anyone else finds themselves in a similar situation. Discussions with another vet brought up the possibility that Millie thought we were sleeping in her bed, which turned out to be correct. She and her crate were shifted out of the bedroom for two months while she readjusted to sleeping in there with the door closed, and she wasn't allowed on our bed any other times. After those two months we moved the crate back into our bedroom and she's getting on absolutely fine - she sleeps right through the night and doesn't stir too much. Fingers crossed it continues!
  2. Thank you! We handed in a fecal sample earlier in the week and it's been sent to the local vetinary school to run some tests on so when they call I will definitely make sure to ask about hookworm.
  3. You have no idea how happy I am to hear someone else has been through this, though I'm sorry to hear she was vocal too - that's the one silver lining with Millie, she doesn't bark or howl, just breathes on our faces until we wake up! What you described about overhauling the feeding is EXACTLY what our vet suggested on Monday, and exactly what we've done. She's now being fed most of her dinner at 10pm, with a small snack at 5 to see her through til then. By making this change, for the past few days she's sleeping most of the night, and although she still wakes at 4, she seems aware that she doesn't get any attention or food and has just been changing where she sleeps (moving from crate to rug or couch) or circling for five minutes before going back to sleep. I've been looking at automatic feeders and I think it's definitely something to invest in!
  4. Hi, thank you so much for your reply! Unfortunately we can't guess when she'll wake - it seems to be random between 2 and 5am, sometimes earlier but usually between those hours. We used the alarm clock trick initially in pushing her breakfast time back from 5am to 7am and it worked well but this time we've no idea of when she'll stir, so we can't really pre-empt it with an alarm 😭
  5. Thank you so much for your response! The thing about the neighbours specifically mentioning 5am is that she's actually up anywhere between 2 and 5, so while it's probably annoying for them to wake up a few hours earlier than normal, for us we just don't get sleep if she wakes up as early as 2! She doesn't need to go out, she'll happily go outside but won't do anything while she's there, and given the timings are so random I don't think there's any noise that would be waking her - even if there was, I'd be concerned about her behaviour thinking it's time to eat/play at 2am. Another forum said to try brain games with her and I think that's probably the one thing we haven't done yet so will give that a go today. It definitely feels like a mystery novel for sure, like a big game of Cluedo except we're exhausted while playing 😅
  6. Hi all, long time lurker, first time poster. I don't even know if Behaviour is the place for this or if it should be in Health or Food... Wondering if anyone has had any experiences similar to ours because we're at a point where we're beginning to struggle with sleep. We've had our ex-racer girl for 3 months now and she's the absolute light of our lives. About a month in, however, she stopped sleeping through the night (I knew 11pm-7am was too good to be true but I'd hoped it would last!) She would have us up three or four times a night, and the behaviour was always the same - she'd jump on our bed to wake us, then back down onto the floor, run through to the living room to lead us to her food bowl, and then roll over on her back with (what we assumed was) the expectation of being scratched but now I worry it's actually a submissive roll over because this is where she often realises the game is up and she's not getting fed. I'm trying to think of everything that we've tried, because there's been so much (!): At first we thought maybe she was hungry, so we changed her feeding schedule to include a snack before bed. Then we thought she was cold, so we bought warmer pajamas (in June?!) and then, maybe warm, but it's worse when she doesn't wear the pajamas. We got a crate for her, she likes it but she won't sleep the full night in it and still has this bizarre hungry/wanting to play/not really sure what she wants behaviour through the night. She gets plenty of exercise through the day, so we're confused. We've tried NutraCalm from the vets, but it gives her loose stools, so don't want to do that again, and a few weeks after this started she was treated for a stomach bug with antibiotics, which she seemed to recover from pretty quickly. Because she's running to her bowl in such a frantic manner, I'm worried that she's hungry, but I'm unsure how to tell the difference between genuinely hungry and food motivated? She gets fed the correct amount according to her weight, which we've confirmed with the vet, and we've also tried bulking her food up with some steamed veggies, but she still seems to be constantly hungry. Through this whole time, we haven't been rewarding the nighttime behaviour, and doing that, we've managed to get her down to one zoomie per night - and while that's great, we're trying to stay in the good books with our neighbour, who is complaining that he can hear her getting up at 5am. Of course, we chose to bring her into our lives so we don't mind once per night, but it's selfish of us to believe that the neighbour will be happy to see the progress she's made. Has anyone else had anything similar to this or has any suggestions?!
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