June 23rd, 2008
Dry during the day, wet diaper in the morning
Our Son was pretty good with going to the bathroom during the day, wears underwear, goes to the bathroom himself, comes to Mama or Papa when he does number 2 and needs his behind cleaned with a moist wipe.
At first he was also not having any problems at night. But after about 6 months of being dry and sleeping in his underwear he got up in the morning all wet. So back to square one we thought. We always put a diaper on him at night, thinking some morning he’ll just wake up and be dry.
Nope, unfortunately, wasn’t the case. We tried everything, waking up during the night to go, waking him up really early in the morning to go. Nothing worked, he always threw a fit screaming saying he didn’t have to go and just wanted to go back to sleep. We just always seemed to miss it, next morning wet diaper again.
He had a doctor’s appointment, and not knowing where to turn I discussed right in front of my son, who was listening intently and smerking at me the whole time, how we were looking for any possible tips and tricks and if it was normal..what should we do?
He gave me the answer you would expect: encourage him, motivate him with positive reinforcement - or maybe with little surprises like stickers - but then he said something which started us thinking…tell him to go to the bathroom routinely like every hour, every two hours… I said ok and we drove home.
Then at home I was thinking…how do we do that..how do I remember once an hour or two to tell him to go to the bathroom? I told my husband we have to set some kind of alarm or something otherwise I’ll definitely forget!
My son happened to be in the room and added excitedly, “Oh yeah Mama, you can give me the swing alarm!”. I was like, “What swing alarm?”..he said.. “You know, the one you always used to let Zygmunt and I know when it was our turn to go on the swing” (unfortunately, we only have one swing at the moment ..). Then I remembered, I used my old cellphone to set the alarm stopclock for five minutes and it would beep like crazy and they would know it was time to switch turns on the swing.
My husband and I thought during the day he does everything perfect so it would’t make much sense, but at night we could try it out.
We tuck our kids in to bed twice, because after the first time normally they uncover themselves, sneaking around between the rooms before they fall asleep. We kept putting his diaper on before the first tuck in and at the second tuck in (late at night, kids are always in deep sleep) set the alarm for 6:30 a.m and put it under his pillow.
Didn’t work. My husband said, it’s probably set to late so we set it earlier and earlier and earlier. Finally after getting down to 5:30 a.m. it worked. But I think only because he hears the alarm and decides to get up “himself “. And I think it also played an important role that we talked with his doctor in front of him about the problem, somehow he thought that was cool.
Now he’s really proud and always comes to our bedroom in the morning with his dry diaper! We told him if the diaper stays dry for like a month or two straight we can try underwear again…we’ll see.. up to now it looks pretty promising!