Night freedom

Mark and I had been trying to decide when to start giving more freedom to Mia at night. She usually sleeps in the crate at night, in our room, and she's crated during the day when we're not home, in the living room (we have two crates).

We think her crates are starting to be too small for her, and we're not sure if we can afford buying a new crate right now... When she's lying down in the crate she fills out the whole space from front to back, and she has to be sideways from corner to corner. When she sits up in the crate, her head is pushing up on the top.

We have a bigger crate that someone gave us, and we were thinking of using that during the day in the living room, but it's too big to put in our bedroom where Mia sleeps. I like having her with us in the bedroom, and if she's in the crate in the living room and she knows we're in the house she doesn't stop whining...

We were trying to figure out if she's ready to have more freedom at night and sleep on her bed next to ours instead of IN the crate?

So we gave it a try last night, since today I'm home, so if I didn't get much sleep it would be okay, and Mark can function on less sleep than I can.

We cleared everything that we didn't want her to chew and tucked the comforter under the mattress at the end of the bed. We left the crate door opened for her and we put her bed next to it on the floor and brought some Kong chew toys in the room. And we closed the bedroom door so she couldn't get out.

We told her the usual "go to sleep" and she went in her crate, but we left the door open and then turned off the lights.

I heard her get up after a couple of minutes and she paced around the bed for a few minutes, even came to see me on my side of the bed and put her nose on my hand (so cute!). But she finally settled down after a few minutes and we slept through the whole night! I couldn't see in the dark, but I think she slept on her bed mostly.

Oh, and even when I got up in the middle of the night to go to the washroom, she didn't get up or anything.

I'm so proud of her and hope it continues going well.