Potty night

We were very, very, very, very lucky (very lucky) that Baby B slept through the night early on. Around 6 weeks old, I stopped setting my clock to wake her up, and she started sleeping through the night then and we haven’t looked back.

As I said, very lucky.

We’ve been blessed with unbroken sleep for nearly 2 1/2 years, so you might think it strange that I was excited to have to get up with Baby B during the night on Tuesday night/Wednesday morning.

Why?

Because she woke up at 2:45 p.m., cried out an urgent cry, and said, “I need to go potty!” The child who doesn’t stir during the night woke up, realized she had to potty, and said it out loud so we could come help her. I was so excited to jump up and take her to the bathroom. And sure enough, she woke up dry later that morning.

We’re not officially doing nighttime potty training, but we’re keeping track of how often she wakes up dry, and she gets to put a smiley sticker on the calendar if she does, which happens maybe three days a week right now. Mostly we started doing this so we could see how often she wakes up dry, but she loves putting the sticker on the calendar on dry mornings — it’s the first thing she says when The Husband goes to wake her up — so it’s also giving her some incentive. We’re working on explaining to her why sometimes she wakes up wet (like if she has too much water to drink at bedtime) so she better understands the mechanics of what’s going on and she can eventually control it herself. So I guess I shouldn’t say that we’re not actively working on it, because I guess we are taking steps to help her in that direction. Perhaps I should say we don’t have any timeline in mind for accomplishing this goal.

I told myself we wouldn’t use Pull-Ups at all, but we did make the decision to switch to them at night. Here’s my thinking: We’d made such a big deal about switching out of diapers during the day, and diapers are for babies, etc., yet we were still putting overnight diapers on her at night. While Pull-Ups might feel similar to diapers, they are designed differently enough to seem different for night. Pull-Ups weren’t for us for daytime training since I wanted to make the switch to undies full-on, but the fact is most children don’t train at night as quickly, so we needed something different but similar at night. So far it’s working well for us.

Still no issues with daytime. I feel like I can confidently say she is trained during the day. I don’t get nervous when we leave the house, wondering if she’s going to have an accident. I know she might will at some point, but I feel confident that it’s not nearly as likely. I’m so proud of her!