Not sure why, but somewhere during my Costco trip on Monday I decided I wasn't buying pull ups for my two boys that wear them this trip. I was going to go all undies at night for a week and see what happens. This could be great or it could lead me to do even more laundry than I already do!
I have met some people that say they never buy them and their kids have a few accidents and then they just learn. While others tell me that their kid is 8 and still wears pull ups and that I shouldn't sweat it.
I am fine if they can't help it, but I want this week to show them that they are peeing in their beds and not just rely on pull ups to catch their pee! ugh. gross if you ask me. 🙂
So, being the good blogger that I am I will chronicle this week – not like any of you give a flying flip about my kids and their pee schedules at night, but what the heck. Maybe you'll have great tips for me to help me put $$$ back in my wallet each month by not buying pull ups each month!
Night one:
7pm potty
9pm potty and child #2 has already wet the bed – gracious this could be a long week!
10:30 potty
3:00 am potty
7:00 am wake up and child #1 has wet the bed sometime between 3am & 7am after using the bathroom four times in the past 12 hours – I repeat … this could be a long week!
ZERO success
Night #2:
7pm potty
10:30 pm – potty & child #1 has wet the bed – should have gone in at 10!
11:30 – potty
2:30 am – potty
7am – potty
1 out of 2 =success
If you are wondering how I'm getting up in the wee hours of the night to take kids potty it's because for some reason a certain child in our house who shall remain nameless (rhymes with Lori) has been getting up crying. Who knows why. I figure since I'm up I might as well wake up kids to take them to the bathroom.
Amos is usually not happy about this one bit. He actually stands at the toilet and refuses to try. Last night we stood there in a silent battle for 4 minutes. That is a LONG time at 3 in the morning!
Night #3 … who knows what tonight will hold. I'll have to update you later. I'll know you'll hardly be able to sleep wondering if Jamie's kids are peeing in their beds or not.
Oh yeah … last night child #2 earned himself a piece of candy at breakfast for not peeing in the bed. Good reward or not? Should I reward them for not peeing? What if they can't help it? A couple of months ago we told them we would give them $10 for not wetting the bed for 10 days. One of them made it. Got his $10 and immediately started wetting the bed again. What the heck? Is he trying to make me put out some more money?!?!? Maybe he thinks I'll offer $20 next time!
UPDATED March 5 (5 nights down & 2 to go)
I HATE this experiment. I'm washing sheets daily! SO …. last night was crazy family night and 2 out of 3 boys woke up in the middle of the night because they had wet the bed. Lovely! Believe it or not, but child #1 that ALWAYS wets his pull up was dry! YES he was dry! I'm not sure how that happened but it did. He got candy and we all screamed and yelled!
Aaron and I really feel that child #1 is not ready for underwear even though he was dry last night. 🙂 So … I think we'll keep trying if they didn't have lots to drink and go from there.
Hilarious. 🙂 We have two in pull-ups for naps/bedtime. RARELY are they dry. One child has major sensory issues and I sometimes wonder if she’ll wear a pull up on her wedding night. Yes, having bed-wetters can make you say/think strange things.
Currently we’ve been telling them if they wake up dry from naps we’ll pay them a quarter. Figure I’m saving some money this way!! 😉
We have three older kids. One was a wetter til age 10, even after two solid years of him praying to the Lord for healing in this area. One week he went through this big growth spurt and like literally over night he was then 99% dry forever. Other two guys never had an issue.
Such are the joys of motherhood. 😉
Oh, man we are RIGHT THERE with you! Just one kiddo, though. Our 5 year old boy, and we’re having the same dilemma–is it out of his control? Is he just working the system? Am I being unreasonable? I like your idea of trying for a week. We’ve been in undies at night for about 5 days, and only had one accident, but wondering how long I can keep taking him to the potty throughout the night! Keep it up! I’m dying to know whether or not Jamie’s kids are wetting the bed or not. 🙂 But it seems we are not alone in this parenting challenge, and that always seems a bit encouraging, right?
Love this honest and funny post. Be encouraged. Hang in there. Keep doing what you think is best for your kids. At some point being wet will also serve as a natural consequence and they will begin to gain independence, no shame in incentives. A friendly challenge amongst siblings never hurt either–they will encourage one another stay dry, but you certainly have to remember that accidents happen and there is no shame in that while we are learning… 🙂 Best wishes!!
Great idea! Since I am a nurse (and not a mom) I am wondering – how much peeeee can these kids hold? Goodness gracious! I would think that, biologically, if their last drink is at dinner time (and 1 cup at that time), that, physically, they would be all dried up? But what do I know? I’m a RN, not MOM. 😉
We had bed wetting issues with our oldest (he was 4). I bought a fish (something he really wanted) and told him that it was mine until he didn’t pee in the bed for 7 nights. Seven nights later and the fish was his! He just needed the right motivation. My other two boys (that are potty trained) never wet the bed once they were potty trained (at 3). I don’t know what the difference was, but it was so nice to not deal with it. They still wake up during the night to pee, but they can do it themselves and I just sleep thru it.
Went through this w/ my oldest and at 6 the pediatrician suggested a bed wetting alarm. He was SOAKING a pull up every night. For a kid with sensory issues having a VERY loud alarm go off at 1 am is a nightmare. And thus it is a nightmare for mom.
Then I found the Potty Pager – clip it in the flap in their underwear. When it gets wet it starts to vibrate in a random (non sleep-inducing) pattern to wake the child up. No noise.
Within 1 week he was dry most nights, within 3 weeks (their recommended use time) he was dry all the time.
It is a BEAUTIFUL thing and I wondered why I hadn’t started it 2 years earlier 🙂
http://www.pottypager.com/
I’ve loaned mine out to a zillion friends who swear by it too. It’s a tad pricey but sleep, sanity and the $$ saved in pull-ups is totally worth it.
J is 13 and still wets the bed regularly. He has been home from Haiti for 1 1/2 years. Last summer I quit buying overnight pants. It helped. When he pees the bed he takes off the sheets, puts them in the washer and starts it. Then he remakes his own bed with another clean set of sheets. We never make a big deal of it if he wets but we have some “prizes” that he has to go 7 dry nights (not in a row, just 7 nights) before he can pick one. They are things from the $1 aisle at Target or a pack of gum. We tried the waking him up to pee before we went to bed and it just didn’t work for us.
Jamie –
I wet the bed until I was about 13 or so. It was completely and utterly out of my control. this was back in the 1970s (yes I am that old!) and my parents took me to doctor after doctor. I had to have tests and take medication, and it was a huge stress for me. It all made me feel horrible. My parents never got mad at me, I was never punished for wetting the bed, nor was I rewarded for not wetting the bed. Nonetheless it made me very sad and stressed. I worried that I would always be that way. Fast forward to my child; he will be 9 in July. He is a bedwetter. He still wears pullups but most times is dry now. I waited until he was 8 years old before purchasing a bedwetting alarm (they work, but often when you stop using them the child goes back to bedwetting.) We used it religiously for about 5-6 months, and then I got up with him for several months whenever he would wake up. He turned into a sleepwalker because now he wakes up to pee, but isn’t fully awake. I sleep with a monitor so I can here him. Again, he is mostly dry now. My point to all this is that if a child is a bedwetter, there is amost always an underlying problem and the child literally cannot help it. Research (and there has been a lot of it) has failed to come up with a single reason. Rarely is it an actual physical issue related to bladder structure, although sometimes a child’s bladder can be too small. Most often it is because the child is an extremely heavy sleeper, and the brain cannot be awakened by the “signal” from the bladder at night. If you google enuresis, you will get lots of info. Here’s a good link: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmedhealth/PMH0002523/. can you tell I’m a little passionate about this. Really, it made me so sad and confused and embarrassed as a child. I never want my children to feel that way. To compare, my 3-year-old, adopted from Guatemala, has been dry at night (except for two instances) since she was potty trained at 2 years old. I think your test is a good idea, but don’t get discouraged. I would have loved to stop paying for and using pull-ups (we actually had to use the ones specially designed for enuresis called G’nights… pull-ups weren’t heavy-duty enough!) but I could never have kept up the laundry. And I would have had to change the sheets multiple times at night. I couldn’t even ever get the timing right to try and catch him before he peed. I am so glad now we seem to have overcome it. Good luck!!
Cheers,
Beth
Not to be too lame or stalkerish, but I was kinda wondering how the no pull-ups week was going…and more importantly, did you make top 5 in the dj contest????????????/
Yes I made the top 5! I’ll be on the air next Thursday (10th).
I just updated the post: http://dreamingbigdreams.net/?p=5179
I am having issues with my son age 6. Took him to a urologist who said he is not emptying his bladder completly during the day. She sugested he go every 1 1/2-2 hours like clock work during the day and remind him to empty completly which will help him retrain his bladder. I have tried but trying to remind him is hard since he is older and so on. Plus he is in school. Who knows their potty scedule there, Also since he is not emptying during the day completly then he is relaxed at night and then lets it ALL out. It is such a pain I tell ya. How old are the kids that are having this issue. On the upside at least there are others out there struggling. I at times feel like the only person who is dealing with this. It’s like having a potty trained child is a badge of honor…HA!
I am laughing hysterically after reading this because I totally get this. We never did pull-ups at night. I just faithfully washed the bedding pretty much every morning until my now 7 yr old was 6yrs old. He refused to wear a pull-up. And him being our first born we didn’t want to hurt his ego ;). We even tried the chiro but that didn’t help either. I guess his bladder just finally matured. We are now going through it with our two three yr olds and it is doubly painful. Not sure what we’re going to end up doing. We are not getting up in the night with these two unless they wake up. I use to have issues with them laying in pee but I’ve gotten over that and figure they would wake up if it really bothered them (which they usually do around 2am). We change the bedding and go back to sleep. worry
I was going to say, I started to worry that getting my kiddos up so much in the night was training them to just release little amounts at a time. I think if any of us really knew what the “secret” was we could market it like crazy. Good Luck!