Potty Training Updates

Lately Rachel has been waking up around 5:30 in the morning just to tell me that she's dry.

When we started this whole potty-training-at-night business I told her that she could wake me up whenever she had to go potty in the middle of the night. 5:30 am is still pretty much the middle of the night, in my opinion. It is, at any rate, not an hour when I'm inclined to agree that playing Ring Around the Rosie or Memory is a great idea.

So even though Rachel wants to get up, we tell her to go back to bed for a little while.

I think that 5:30 am must be the time at which, if she is going to pee in her diaper, she pees. And that's why she wakes up, so that she doesn't pee in her diaper, so that she can get a sticker, so that she can get a prize (she's working on earning a ball right now). The solution to this sounds easy: get her to go potty and then put her back to bed.

Oddly enough, she doesn't ever want to go potty when she first wakes up. This morning I had to bribe her with gummy bears. She sat on the potty screaming "NO!" for 10 minutes and did nothing, but the minute I mentioned gummy bears she magically filled the pot. Filled--so obviously she had to go before gummy bears were involved. Then she got put back to bed.

She was dry when she woke up for church this morning. So she got a sticker.

A few nights ago, though, she woke up too early, again. I made Andrew get out of bed to deal with her. He tried to make her go potty, to no avail, so he just diapered her and put her back to bed. She woke up wet. And wanted a sticker because, as she put it,

"Inna morning, Dachel dry. Dachel say, 'Dachel dry!' Dada say, 'Good night.' Dachel pee pee inna bed now."

So she remembers waking up earlier, telling us she was dry, and us putting her back to bed...and then her peeing in her diaper. She thinks she still deserves a sticker because when she woke up she was dry. And it's not really her fault that she wound up back in bed because it's not like she didn't petition to stay up--she did, but only for about 2 minutes before she fell back asleep (because 9 PM to 5 AM isn't enough sleep for a baby, maybe).

It is kind of her fault for refusing to use the potty when she wakes up, though. Who wakes up because they have to use the washroom and then refuses to go? That's just not logical.

I haven't quite decided what to do about sticker rewards in this situation. I gave her one this time because, let's face it, that was some pretty awesome reasoning for a two-year-old. But I'm not sure if I can continue doing that because she did, in the end, wet the bed and that's not a behavior we're rewarding.

Does staying dry until 5 am, and coming to tell us so, and then later peeing the bed count as staying dry? In my mind it doesn't, but I can see how she would think it would count.

Oh, also, the rate at which she's receiving stickers has dwindled dramatically because she stopped taking naps again, which means she doesn't get stickers for staying dry during naps.

She took almost daily afternoon naps from mid-April to mid-June and I thought that, for once in her life, she had become a regularly-napping child. Alas! But those two months of napping were so lovely while they lasted and definitely coincided nicely with a time in my pregnancy when I desperately needed a regularly-napping child. I'm pretty spoiled when it comes right down to it.