“A child educated only at school is an uneducated child.”
~ George Santayana

Inspirations

Log In

Potty Talk

It has been just about two weeks now, and Meredith still hasn’t had an accident in the house. She will very clearly say “pee” or “poop” and/or go find her potty and independently sit herself down on it. Even if we’re busy, distracted, someone is over, nursing, etc. It’s great! If we’re out and about, she will still go in a diaper, though if we remember to ask her if she needs to go she will tell us.

One side effect of this whole potty training business is loss of sleep at night. Last night, she woke up several times in a row, took a long time to nurse back to sleep, was restless, and then would wake up again very shortly. I finally asked her if something was wrong, and she sat up and said “pee!” Oh. Of course.

For a long time she has hated having her diaper changed or being taken to potty at night. Hated it. I was one of those mothers who swore my child would never sit in a wet diaper for longer than a few minutes even if it meant getting up several times a night to change them. And I meant it. And for the first year? or so of her life, I stuck to it. She was often dry all night before she was a year old because I would take her potty whenever she woke up to nurse. But then she started screaming every time I tried to change her diaper or take her potty at night. Then once I had managed to change her, I would have to console her enough that she would settle and nurse, and then, because she’d woken herself up so much screaming, I’d have to nurse her for far longer than normal. And then I’d be way more awake from having had to go through all that. Trying to change her after she fell asleep was no good. It invariably woke her up and we’d have to go through all that anyway. So, I decided that obviously being in a wet diaper at night bothered me more than it bothered her. Since she never got rashes from wet diapers, we invested in really nice (but expensive) nighttime diapers to make her more comfortable, and we just don’t worry about nighttime pottying. (Well, unless she poops, but I can only think of one time that has happened in a very long time.)

But now it seems she has decided that she actually would prefer not to sit in a wet diaper at night. Fair enough. I wouldn’t want to either. I guess I’ll have to pay attention when she wakes up restless from now on. We used to have a potty in the bedroom, but that has been relegated to our backyard. I think it will need to go back in the bedroom so we’re not having to get up and go to the bathroom any time she needs to pee at night.

Funny, anti-EC’ers make comments about how much work EC is or how inconvenient it can be, and yet by all accounts we did a pretty lazy version of EC and she is potty trained before two with very little work on our part and literally no actual “potty training.” I’ve rarely had to rush her to the toilet, or stop what I’m doing to get her there. If she needs to go and can’t do it herself for some reason and I’m busy, I can ask her to wait and she will. Obviously I won’t make her wait longer than a minute or two right now, but I certainly don’t have to immediately drop what I’m doing either.

One of Kris’ conditions for getting pregnant again was for Meredith to be potty trained before the morning sickness hit. We didn’t think it was actually going to happen but obviously she knew better. ;)

Related posts:

  1. Cushy Bottoms
  2. Diaper-Free
  3. Baby Moon
  4. Baby Bottoms
  5. Diaper-Free

Leave a Reply

 

 

 

You can use these HTML tags

<a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <strike> <strong>