April 21, 2010 | Parenting, Potty Training
Potty training is hard. Eventually, after at least four years of diapers and at least two years of sticker charts, begging, bribing, yelling, accidents, wailing and gnashing of teeth we got both kids day trained.
This meant that all day long things were cool. Everybody used the toilet as needed, and then at night they would wear a pull-up.
A month, or maybe two months later the boy was waking up every morning with a dry pull-up. Ta da! Night trained! It was joyous and way cheaper and I didn’t really have to do anything except make sure he went to the bathroom right before he went to bed and right after he woke up.
Because if he didn’t use the toilet right after he woke up, he would use the conveniently placed pull-up instead.
The girl has been an entirely different story. We’ve tried every non-surgical trick in the book. She just sleeps so hard! It isn’t lack of will, it is just that when she is asleep, she is asleep. If she wets the bed she doesn’t even notice.
After talking to other parents (including my own – apparently I had the same problem which isn’t really much of a surprise since I have been known to sleep through sonic booms) I realized that she would eventually wake up and go to the bathroom when she had to pee at night. This is a common thing and that is why they can get away with charging $19.99 for a pack of 27 big kid overnight pull-ups. So for now, we go to the bathroom at bedtime and then before I go to bed I take her to the bathroom again.
Everyone says that nobody ever goes off to college in a diaper.
Two days ago I ran out of pull-ups.
No big deal, we decided. She would try to stay dry. She would see if she could do it.
At 10:00 I went to take her to the bathroom. She was dry! Hooray!
I walked her down the hall.
Our bathroom is maybe three feet from Claudia’s bedroom door. Her bed is approximately ten feet from the toilet. This is not a long trip, but there are two turns and she almost always misses one. I’m not kidding. This is how hard she sleeps. I honestly think that most nights she walks to the bathroom, uses the toilet and goes back to bed without ever actually waking up.
Which would explain why last night she sat down without pulling down her pajama shorts and peed right through them.
Sigh.
Right through the shorts into the toilet.
That explains that, but it doesn’t really address why neither she nor I found it important for her to put anything back on the bottom half of her person before she went back to bed.
I have no reasonable explanation for that unless you count laziness, but it does lead me to this morning when a small girl walked into my bedroom where I was sleeping and said.
“I should warn you. I’m not wearing any pants.”
That is one hell of a way to wake up.
