I feel safe admitting it here. I have dropped the potty training ball. I admit it. I was so weary of seemingly never ending potty training; I didn’t give a flying rip at the time if my kids EVER nighttime potty trained. So I just didn’t deal with it. I ignored the whole thing. Slapped them into those nighttime pull-ups and called it good to go. I would think about nighttime dryness every once and awhile, but everyone would reassure me… it would just happen and not to fret my pretty little head about it. But now my type A nature is rearing it’s ugly head. I want to succeed! I want my kids to succeed! Someone please help us!!!

Oh I can hear many of you out there muttering under your breath already: “Oh Kym… don’t worry about it… they won’t be wetting the bed when they are college”. Yeah yeah ok. Blah blah blah. But surely you can see where I would feel like I have failed. None of my kids are nighttime trained. None.Of.Them. What am I doing wrong?

You see dear readers; I have my own little scientific experiment going on here. I have three biologically different kids (for those of you new to my blog, Dinara and Noah are adopted and are not biologically related siblings). I can really see the influence of heredity vs environment. And I have to say, I think from looking outside this Petri dish I call my family, this night time potty thing has more to do with environment then heredity. Cause what are the chances all three kids would be late nighttime trainers?

Noah is 3 ½. I don’t expect him to be dry really. But I worry I have missed his “sensitive period” when nighttime potty training comes easily. You get it right… that I am going to screw him up like I did the girls.

Dinara is 5 ½ and she is dry half the time. And then only really recently since I have started bribing her with nail polish. She actually was potty trained when we adopted her from Kaz at age 2 ½ but completely regressed for a while and we didn’t push it. Plus, weren’t waking her up at 12 am like her caregivers in the orphanage were. You can call me lazy. It’s ok. And she soon learned the magic of pull-ups. In Kaz, if she wet the bed, she slept in a wet bed. Here if she wet, the wetness was whisked away into the jelly wonderful wonderland of pull-ups!

Emma is almost 7 and God Bless her, she sleeps so soundly she just doesn’t wake up at night. She’s one of those kids we wake up to go to the potty and she falls asleep on the toilet never waking up enough to go. We just got her the prescription for that hormone to help with nighttime potty training, but so far, we’ve had mixed results. This is very alarming to her…as she is self conscious about the fact that her younger sister is dry more often then she is.

So you see… I don’t have any success in this department. My biggest related item that comes even close to being defined as success was finding out that Safeway carries a store brand of GoodNight Pullups and they are half price on sale. I figure this will save me about $350 over the course of a year!! Hey.. it’s a start. Cause lets face it, these dang pull-ups aren’t cheap when you figure you are just throwing them out!!! (Tell me why doesn’t Costco make or sell these things?)

So lets do a little recap of the facts since I have been quite wordy:

1. Most parents have their kids nighttime potty trained by age 5.
2. Some parents have their kids nighttime potty trained by age 3.
3. None of my kids are nighttime potty trained.
4. All my kids are not biologically related

Thus my hypothesis is that I am doing something really wrong in the nighttime potty training department. That this is more about the environment then it is about heredity.

So … dear readers… does anyone have any tips? I am currently doing the whole waking them up at around 11pm but I still have wet kids in the morning. We are watching fluid intake in the evenings. Any other suggestions?

Related posts:

  1. Girl Talk
    2.    In an effort to post some lighter fare to...
  2. Potty Training 301
    3.   Potty training never stops folks! The set...
  3. Not so compassionate mommy
    4.    Does Hallmark make “sorry you found out...