Having kids is certainly rewarding and a great experience, but it’s also extremely confusing! I find myself reaching to my blog or parent community websites more often than not, just to find advice from other parents who are asking the same questions or going through the same experience as me. Okay it does sound a little weird to get advice from complete strangers online, but it has actually helped me quite a bit. This is especially true after dealing with many of my friends (a lot of them without kids), who would tell me just to “not worry about it” when I asked them about how long my daughter should have her pacifier or wear diapers to bed at night.
Well, I know my daughter isn’t going to be going to college with her binky and a Pull-Up, but that doesn’t mean I shouldn’t be worrying about these things right now! My little one is 3 and a half, and the potty issue has been difficult to say the least. She really has a hard time sleeping through the night, and that’s why I ALWAYS put a diaper on her at night. I don’t think that she is too old for these yet, and I only use them when she goes to bed at night. This means she’s going to day care and taking naps throughout the day without the diaper, and so far it’s been smooth sailing with no accidents.
Right now my biggest surprise is that my daughter wants to sleep through the night without a diaper and with regular underwear. Yes, she actually asked me if she could wear her big girl underwear to bed! I think it’s absolutely fantastic she wants to feel like a “grown up”, and I’ve been trying to find the right time to get started with diaper-free overnights. Before I couldn’t do it because I was going out of town and trying to get on a potty system would have been difficult. Plus, she didn’t express the want to not have them, so I just waited. I am worried that there are going to be a lot of accidents resulting in my washing machine running 24/7 (I should probably stock up on additional bed sheets), but it’s still exciting nonetheless.
Update
Have you been waiting to hear what happened? Maybe not, but I’m going to tell you anyways! Hey, if you have kids then this advice just might come in handy in the near future. The first couple of days went pretty much as I expected, and she ended up having a couple of accidents. I ended up putting her back into diapers after that, because she actually asked me to. I figured that I should start putting more effort into this now, so I ended up keeping those diapers on and waking her up a couple of times every night to go to the bathroom. Was I exhausted? YES!
Okay, I am still exhausted from doing this for TWO WEEKS, but it was definitely worth it. Guess what? She hasn’t had an accident since those first couple of nights, and although I miss sleeping through the night, things are going fairly smoothly. I’m actually surprised things have gone so well, and hope that it will continue like this for at least a week or two more until I can transition her into self-bathroom trips. After all, I’m really only being an alarm clock, and that is getting tiring.
My question for other parents out there (please help me out here, for my sanity) is: what should I do next? I’ve been scouring other parent blogs, and they say that waking the child up throughout the night results in bad habits. Well, I guess I’m already in too deep to care about that, but I don’t know what to do next. When will she start to wake herself up to go to the bathroom, so I can sleep and enjoy actually finishing a dream or too? Or should I continue doing this for the next couple of weeks and make it a month total?
Anyone who can offer insight, please help me out! I am interested in hearing opinions, experiences and basically anything else that will give me a smidge of assistance. Oh, and PLEASE don’t tell me “not to worry about it”, because I’ve heard enough of that from my friends!