Night time potty training

Day training is going well.  For the most part we are accident free, but some days/evenings are worse than others.  I think social gatherings might be a problem, but for the most part we're pretty good.  I did want to give a synopsis of how night training went for us.

We started night time potty training at the end of April, which was about a month after we started day training.  After about 2.5 weeks of night training I was feeling as if things were a disaster and wrote this post in response to someone else on a forum who was having trouble with training.:

• He'll pee before his bath around 7:45/8:00. Sometimes he'll pee again while sitting on his potty hearing his bedtime story.
• Then after being put to bed, about 10 minutes later he's calling again for the potty. He's one of those kids who stays in bed due to the "magic forcefield" and won't get out on his own. Sometimes he calls 3-4 times, but usually only pees one of those times. Not sure if it's a stall tactic or what.
• 10:30/11:00 ish- whenever we go to bed we put him on the potty. Usually dry when we go in and he will pee on the potty.
• 1:00, although recently we started pushing this time a little later. To begin with he was often wet when we went in to him, but lately he has been dry. If not wet, he will pee on the potty.
• 3:30-4:30 - We've played with the timing on this one a bit, trying to get to him before he wets the bed. This is probably the trickiest for us. Lately he's been dry a bit more, but I would say in the 2+ weeks we've been doing this, it's been about half wet, half dry. Again, if he's dry he'll pee on the potty, but not if he's already wet.
• Wake up between 6:30 and 7:00. I'd say this is also a 50-50 split of wet and dry. Depends if we wake him up versus him waking up on his own.

It's exhausting and frustrating and I wish there was a magic wand to wave to either keep him dry or convince him to wake up and pee on his own. He can hold his pee 2.5-3.5 hours during the day but won't do it overnight. Like you, our son is in daycare so we really don't know how much he drinks there. He doesn't drink a lot at home in the evenings. We are lucky that when he wakes up overnight he goes right back to sleep. I'm also lucky because my DH and I alternate going in to him overnight so it's not one person doing all the work.

 

As much as I want this to be figured out quickly, I don't think it's an easy process. Jamie says in her book, "I usually stress that night training comes 2-6 weeks after day training." So I keep reminding myself that this could take a while, which helps with not feeling too discouraged about the lack of "success". And for us, day training went pretty quickly and easily, so it's hard not to expect night training to also go well. But it is harder since he's not awake and thus not aware of what his body is doing.

3 days later, I wrote this post:

So just when I thought things had gotten just about as bad as I could handle, we saw some improvement!

For the past 3-4 nights now my son has stayed dry! We're still going in and waking him up multiple times a night, but we haven't had to wash sheets, which is fabulous!

1 night I slept through an alarm and he woke up about an hour later needing to pee. But the sheets were dry! Woo hoo! On another night when DH put DS on the potty he didn't pee, but then woke up an hour or so later having to go.

I think we might be ready to lengthen times between wake ups or try not setting alarms and just let DS wake up when he needs to pee.

Huge news on 5/21 (about a month after starting):  Last night he slept through the night (well, we put him on the potty around 10:30) and he was dry when we got him up at 6:30 in the morning!!!  Woo hoo for staying dry for 8 hours!!!!

About a month after starting night training Chris and I went away for the weekend.  We weren't sure what would happen when we were away or when we got back.  Apparently while we were away he woke frequently during the night (5-6 times?!) and would pee each time.  So when we got back we decided to not set any alarms.

Ugh!  We had wet sheets multiple times that night.  The next night, when I went in to check on Bennett before going to bed, he was covered in poop.  Yuck!  And it had been there a while, so Chris had to give him a bath (at 10:30 while he was half asleep) while I cleaned up the bedding.  Luckily he fell right back to sleep. 

Since then we've been setting alarms again, but weaning off the frequency.  And on 6/2 he slept through the night from 10:30-6:15.  And proving that he's awesome about going back to sleep, when Chris put him on the potty at 6:15, he told Bennett it was still sleepy time and we got another 30 minutes so that we could get ready before we had to wake him up- at which point he said, "Go away Daddy!"

As of today, June 18th, we've had about a week or so now of dry sheets!  We still wake Bennett and put him on the potty before we go to bed but we aren't setting overnight alarms anymore.  Some nights Bennett wakes up in the middle of the night needing the potty but other nights he sleeps all night.  If I had to guess, I'd say it's a 50/50 mix.  And I've stopped keeping a nighttime pee journal, so I guess that means things are going well.  We've also re-introduced PJ bottoms (we took them away after the first couple of nights) and things seem to be going well.  Can I officially say that we're done with night training?