We soon realised that she was going pee every time she woke up and every approximately 45 minutes after that. We actually noticed that she never peed during naps!
At night time I sometimes tried to put her on the potty but it's a lot of effort in the middle of the night when you're tired and you don't even want to get out of bed! But I knew she wasn't going during naps! And that's when I decided to do something crazy - I just took the nappy right off!
Yep you read that right - I actually just decided that she was going to sleep with no nappy on at 7 months old.
Because at night time, every time she needed to go was usually quite obvious. She would start tossing, turning, and just being generally unsettled. During the day there is so many other distractions, but at night it's quite easy to know when they need to go.
With the nappy off I had no excuses. I couldn't just ignore it, because I didn’t want to be changing the bedsheets in the middle of the night!
- Oh, and I should probably say that Bethany sleeps in our bed so it was quite easy to keep an eye on her, but the risk of wet bed sheets was a big deal!
And sure enough, since then we've only had an accident at night time a couple of times and that was always when she wasn't well.
She was never a good sleeper and she actually started sleeping much better after we started taking her potty in the night. I think the real reason that she had been waking up and tossing and turning on the boob like crazy was actually because she needed to pee! Like this, instead she would go pee on the potty while on the boob and then go straight back to sleep! Amazing!
But this I thought was the crazy bit - babies don’t actually want to sit in wet or dirty nappies! Bethany definitely prefered to go in the potty if it was an option! And if she was in any form of baby carrier - she wouldn’t actually pee! And I can’t believe I didn’t realise that till she was almost half a year old! So yes, they do have some control over their bladders - they can’t hold it in long, but the myth that they have absolutely no control is definitely a myth!
Yes, there is the common saying of “but they’re not ready!” - but I was shocked when I found out where the myth of ‘readiness’ came from - turns out - when disposable nappies first came out in the 1950’s, the companies were having trouble selling them. Parents didn’t want to “put their babies in paper”. So one of the companies paid a doctor to come up with the ‘readiness’ guidelines. Till then, almost all children were out of nappies before they turned 2, but now parents were waiting longer, and thus they switched to the convenience of disposables to keep up with the laundry!!!