My wife and I have a 15 month old bulldog that we have had since she was 10 weeks; her name is Mary. We adopted a German Shepherd mix Husky named Teddy when he was 7 weeks old- the lady that we got him from said he was 8 weeks but he was actually 2 days away from 7 weeks once we calculated his age using his birthday. Mary is trained but we do struggle with small things: sometimes her recall is delayed (we have a fenced in backyard so delayed recall is not dangerous but it is still not ideal; we are working on it), barking when she wants attention, and she still nibbles when she gets too hyper. The thing is that now she is more grown up, she got extremely lonely. She quit playing with her toys alone (only played with us), sometimes she would sit on the couch and whine, and just overall started losing her excitement.
We spent months before we decided to get another dog. We adopted Teddy and he is crazy easy- Mary was a nightmare during the puppy stage but with strict training, she became amazing aside from those little issues that I mentioned before. But Teddy is now 10 weeks and he is potty trained, knows all basic commands, kennel trained, and his recall is fantastic. Mary lost her mind when we brought him home and was so excited but still very gentle with him. She was the happiest that I have ever seen her and still is. You can tell that her life improved by 1000% now that she has a baby brother. We give her extra love though and try to honor the seniority by giving her treats first, spending alone time with her, taking her on doggy dates just us three while my mom babysits Teddy for an hour. The biggest fear that we had was that she would become jealous or feel neglected and good news, it does appear that those feelings have occurred (though I cannot read her mind sadly- wouldn't it be cool if we could?)
Anyway, here's the only problems… they play and play and play. This is not a problem in and of itself but it is to the point where my wife and I try to have a conversation after I get off work and we cannot hear each other. It is constant whining, play growling, them pushing each other off the bed/couch, paws and nails clacking on the floor, etc and it is driving us crazy. Mary still has the issue with barking for attention so she barks at him and now he has started barking back and howling. We do timeouts and scheduled naps for Teddy and it helps but the second that he wakes up or gets let out of timeout, she runs over with her toy to him and "gets him going" as we say. He cannot jump back on the couch/bed either so every time that they get too rowdy and get close to the end of the bed, he usually falls off and we have to pick him back up. If she falls, she can jump back up easily but it is exhausting to have to lean over and get him 50 times a day. If she is in the kennel though or in another room, he just crawls into our arms and cuddles- he is unbelievably clingy and we love it! He is very calm if she is not accessible to him.
We do have a pretty strict routine: Potty one dog at a time, 5 minutes of training with each dog separately, meal time, potty together, playtime, and repeat. During playtime, if they get too hyper and start doing that stuff, we put them each in their separate kennels for a 10-15 minute timeout (we use the kennels as a safe space but never use it for punishments) and then we try playtime again. We thought that maybe they get overstimulated and literally cannot listen when we try to get them to settle down so if it takes about 2 or 3 different times in timeout, we usually put them either in the kennel or on their dog beds for a nap. We take that as a sign that maybe they are just tired and need a break. This does not work. They will take a nap and the second they are awake, it goes again.
Does anyone else have experience with this issue or the other issues that I mentioned? how can we fix this? Is it just an age thing? Is this normal? I know that dogs play but dang lol. Are we correct in thinking that they are overstimulated? I always grew up in a house with either two large dogs or one large and one small dog at a time with similar age differences. They played a lot but nothing like this.
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