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My mom was at the house and thankfully is a dog person. My husband though ended up sleeping at home and not in the hospital. There was really no place for him to sleep that he would have gotten sleep and we live only 5-10 min away so he just went home and cared for the dogs. He was back and forth a couple times during the day to the house and hospital but for us it wasn't a big deal. The day I gave birth though I was in labor for 12 hours at the hospital and he stayed the whole time then and my mom dealt with the dogs then.

We planned to board our dogs with their usual doggie daycare but I was at the hospital less than 36 hours so we ended up just keeping them at home in their usual method with my husband going home twice to feed and give them some attention in our absence.

Can your usual sitter recommend a substitute?

My in laws are planning on picking up our dog when we go to the hospital and will keep her for a week or so until we are settled in with the new baby. They love our dog and she loves them, so it works out perfectly.

I'm not sure honestly. My parents live 2.5 hours away and MIL lives 4 hours away, and I'm not sure what their plans are for while I'm in labor...whether they will be traveling down here to wait at the house or coming to visit after baby is here. If they don't plan on coming down while I'm in labor, we may ask our neighbors to look in on the pets, but our dog is very high spirited and can be overwhelming for people to handle. When we travel we typically board him, but that may not be an option on short notice or at strange hours. Gah, I'm going to put DH in charge of figuring this all out.

My Mother in Law watched our dog at her house while we were in the hospital.

Could you find another dog sitter?

We live about 15 minutes from the hospital, so we'll leave the dogs at home (we have a doggy door for them to go in and out to do their business). Hubs will come home to feed them, and we have friends who live nearby who can walk them. If all goes as planned, I'll deliver vaginally and we'll be home after a couple of days.

@mediagirl: Hhhmhh... that definitely does make things more complicated. I guess have a conversation with your parents and see how comfortable they would be with letting the dogs sleep with them. If they aren't comfortable with that maybe try to look online for local petsitters that you could hire?

My dog is also hard to deal with because he has separation anxiety so we don't like to leave him alone. We gave a couple of people a key to our house so we'd have options of people to call when I went into labor. It ended up being in the middle of the night and we called good friends on the family to come get him in the morning, they know him really well so I felt comfortable with it. And then after LO was born he switched between my parents and DH's.