Back in July of 2013 (yes, almost 2 years ago), I wrote a post called The End of Diapers? In it I detailed what we had done to (day) potty train our 19 month old. Click on the post to read more, but basically we started setting her on the potty before bath time at around 14 months old, starting letting her be naked from the waist down while at home around 16 months old and watched her cues to bring her to the bathroom, and around 19 months we bit the bullet and just sent her to daycare in undies and after a couple of accidents she was totally fine. We could have definitely condensed that process into a shorter time frame, but we decided to not really push the process and just let it happen naturally. Thankfully, Stella was pretty “easy” to train, and she’s stayed dry during her awake hours every since.
As for night training, at the time I wrote, “I have no freaking clue about this step yet, so I’ll update at some later point down the road with how everything is going.”
HA. Nearly 2 years later, I’m baaaaack!
Stella wore pull-ups at naptime and bedtime nearly every day for the last two years. I think that felt like an eternity because she had been out of diapers for so long. Sometimes I’d consider trying to switch to undies, but she was such a hard sleeper and always SO wet when she woke up that I’d quickly abandon the idea. I wet the bed for a long time (like, 9 years I think?), so I was resigning myself to the fact that this would be one way my kid was like me. Stella has been in a toddler bed for about a year and we’ve always encouraged her to get up and go to the bathroom in the middle of the night, but she sleeps so hard that I honestly don’t think it’s ever happened.
Then about two months ago I noticed that Stella was sometimes dry after nap, and one day I just said WHAT THE HELL and decided to go for broke with undies during nap time again. She normally naps from 1-3, so before her nap I talked it up big time how she was going to be SO grown up like Mommy & Daddy and only wear undies during her nap from now on, so we had to be sure to pee on the potty before we laid down because we didn’t want to pee on our blankies.
Dude. She stayed dry.
I think we had maybe 2 accidents over the next 2 months, and that was it. She was done with nap time pull-ups. I felt like punching the air and jumping up and down I was so excited about all of the money we were saving on those damn pull-ups!
Then on Saturday the 25th of April (at 3 years 4 months 17 days old), we went to a dinner party at a friend’s house and got home past their normal bedtime. I was quickly getting Stella settled into bed (pull-up, PJs, brush teeth, book, bed), and when I started to tuck her in, she announced, “Mommy, I don’t want to wear pull-ups at night anymore.”
Um, okay kid. I resigned myself to doing laundry in the morning, took off her pull-up, and tucked her back in.
She stayed dry.
I waited 10 days to write this post because I REALLY didn’t want to jinx it, but I think we finally officially have a kid who is completely potty trained!
Also, you know what I think? I think she was simply being lazy in the morning when she first woke up and was peeing in her pull-up at daybreak. I seriously do. She still rarely gets up in the middle of the night to pee, and now when she wakes up in the morning, sometimes she heads straight to the bathroom and sometimes she plays with Harvey in his crib first, but never is she wet. It’s like she just decided “I’m not going to pee in my pants anymore” and she was done. The one accident she had was the night Charlie had locked their door and I woke up to her sobbing because she was standing at the door and couldn’t get out to pee so she had peed her pants. TOTALLY our fault. #noted
So yeah, no great advice for any other parents out there, but man was I excited to get to finally write this follow up post and tell the world that we are finally saving $75/month on those damn 3t-4t extra absorbent nighttime pull-ups. YIPPEE!!
