Nara

Hi! Thank you for your message, I hadn't even thought about an outdoor area that is fox proof. Good idea. I will defo have a look into it! Completely agree with you. The thing is, my job means I often work from home but it is sporadic and depends on when I have external meetings for work, so I don't want to fully rely on it. I am going to try and make sure the 10hour days do not happen by switching things around/working from home. The other 7-8hr days I think I will hire a dogwalker while she is a puppy and see how she gets on. Today she stayed in her pen for 4 hours while I was upstairs and slept the whole time. I just took her out and played with her and have now put her back in the pen so I can continue working. No noise from her, she is sleeping! Thanks for sending the thread. I will look at it now

Clearly you didn't read the information above where I said I would be changing my days so she wouldn't have to be alone for 10 hours and trying to get a dog walker, obviously your inability to read before commenting says a lot about you, but thanks for your input

Okay I will stick with pen and then if she starts escaping as she gets older, I will move her to the bathroom. My bathroom is warm (my fav place in the winter haha) as my heating pipes run under it and winter is fast approaching in London and lasts forever so I imagine it will be a warm space should she need to be left in there. While I have been home she gets woken up at 7, taken outside for potty and then fed, then play with her until 9, then she is in the crate 9am-12pm, 1pm-4pm, 4:30-6, and taken out inbetween for potty. I push the crate time as much as I can if I see can handle it (most she has done is 3.5hrs so far), however, I have been working on the dining table nearby. Today I decided to leave her in her crate and go upstairs, she has been in there so far 9-12 and whimpered a couple times but otherwise has been sleeping. I have a camera on her and when I could hear her whimpering I spoke on the camera and she wondered where the voice came from and then settled. I have been leaving her training pads but she barely uses them. I just bought her this https://www.amazon.co.uk/Indoor-Toilet-Grass-Restroom-Training/dp/B00ZFLMS5O/ref=pd_lpo_sbs_199_img_0?_encoding=UTF8&psc=1&refRID=7770GW10H4CZR66D8W50 hopefully it will help her feel comfortable peeing inside. Thank you by the way. It is nice to be offered advice/help trying to solve the issue as opposed to be attacked and judged straight away.

I have a garden and an out house but we get foxes in our area and foxes eat puppies so I definitely do not want to be doing that. Please see the comment above for some more information. Also, although I am not comfortable with it, I have started to look at dog walkers just in case it's too much for her, especially if we can't sort out the 10hour days, I think 7-8hrs might be manageable.

Thanks for the response. Just to add, the timings are as follows: 10hrs Monday and Friday, 7-8hrs Tuesday,Wednesday and Thursday. I am going to try and work from home on the Friday and my husband will try and reschedule his monday and work a sunday instead so that the long days aren't too bad, but he will only be able to do this while she is a puppy. I was thinking of leaving her in the bathroom with a radio and she how she gets on. She has quite a large pen and she isnt able to go over it at the moment (80cm high), but I imagine when she gets bigger she most probably will. Should I get her used to being left in the pen or in the bathroom from now? At the moment I am feeding her 3x a day on the schedule that we would be able to do when we go back to work - 8am, 5pm, 9pm and she seems to be fine. She poos in the morning and evening and sometimes in the afternoon. Interesting you say that I shouldn't have taken time off right now, everyone else was telling me the opposite, it does make sense to leave her alone now so she gets used to it. Thank you for your help!!

Hi All, Apologies if I have posted in the wrong place. I recently got a Japanese Spitz, her name is Nara and she is almost 9 weeks old. It took me 7 months to get her because I suffer from serious anxiety and didn't know if I was making the right decision. Anyway, I now have her and she is so cute but I go through waves of thinking I have made the biggest mistake of my life because I am anxious about how she will be when I go back to work. I have currently taken 2 weeks off work to spend time with her, and since her first day she slept throughout the night no problems (we only had to wake her up once to go outside), by day 2 she was sleeping in her pen completely fine for 3-3.5 hours at a time (9am-12pm, 1pm-4pm, 4:30-6) and then from 6pm we let her out in the house to spend time with us so she can get used to the schedule when we finally do go back to work. She only poos outside and generally only pees outside too, we have only had a few pee accidents but now we are used to her schedule she has been pretty good at toilet training. When I go back to work she will be alone between 7hrs-10hrs depending on the day. If she is already sleeping in her crate 3-3.5hrs at a time, and completely well throughout the night, I am hoping she will be okay when we go to work for this long. Does anyone else have a JS and work full time and could you let me know how your spitz gets on when you're at work? Do you leave her in a pen (can she jump over when she gets older?), do you leave her in a room in your house? etc. We will spend an hour in the morning with her before work and then all evening when we get back and take her on long walks and all throughout the weekend. I am not comfortable getting a dog walker as I do not want to give someone access to my house throughout the day and I have no family that lives nearby that can help, and as I am new to the area, I don't have any neighbours who I trust to help. Any info to ease my anxiety would be much appreciated. Thanks!