Chummie

Many of my children have been quite easy to potty train. For example, when I potty trained Alexander through the night, this is how it went:

"Buddy, we're going to put you to bed in your underwear today. No more diapers, okay?"

"Okay."

And...uhhhh...that was...that. Super easy. 

The kid never wet the bed.

Some of my kids have been a bit more of a challenge. For example, Benjamin. We eventually bought a "chummie," taking the advice of my good friend Bridget. Unfortunately for Benjamin it took ages to train him through the night (and the day), even with the chummie and every other trick in the book.

The chummie has sat in a box, waiting to see if it might be useful again, for several years now.

Because the good news is that most kids reach most milestones...eventually. And even though potty training Benjamin was a monumental task...it happened.

So, yes. Rachel and Miriam were easy. Benjamin was a challenge. Zoë and Alexander were easy. And Phoebe...has been a challenge. 

She took to daytime potty training so nicely that I thought for sure she'd be a breeze overnight. 

I was wrong. We have been working on overnight training for nearly two years. Casually—I mean, we wanted to let her be "ready" for it, but most of my kids (see list above) were potty trained over night before, by or around age 2. 

Phoebe is rapidly approaching 4. 

And I've been changing diapers for 18 years...I'm over it. So ready or not...it needs to happen at this point.

The thing about Phoebe is that she is much more timid than Benjamin ever has been. The vacuum still scares her. She can't stand the thought of gross things (she almost threw up when Andrew showed her a squished bug the other day and after she poops she flushes the toilet while she's sitting on it...before calling out to anyone to help her wipe...so she doesn't have to sit there thinking about what's underneath her). And she hates alarms—fire alarms, sirens, timers. 

The chummie is a bed-wetting alarm. 

I brought it out and showed her how it works (if it gets wet...the alarm sounds) and she started crying, "I don't want to wear that!" 

So the first night we just set it out by her bed, with the threat of having to wear it. For a minute I thought the threat of having to wear it would be enough to potty train her because she didn't wet the bed that first night (though I did wake her up in the middle of the night to go potty...in sympathy (wait—no, it was because Andrew put it on wrong (on her bare skin) and it was detecting her sweat and went off...that's what happened...so I took her potty anyway). The next night...she did. So the third night she had to wear the chummie. 

It is very effective at waking her up. 

The first time it went off she ran out of her room in a panic. I helped her turn off the alarm and sat her on the potty (she had the tiniest little bit of pee in her underwear, which the chummie detected). And her level of panic at the alarm has remained high. 

We've talked about how it's helping her train her brain to respond to her bladder. When the alarm goes off her brain gets the message to STOP and make a choice: get up to go potty or hold it until the morning. 

The other night she didn't come running out of her bedroom at the sound of the alarm. I went to find her and she was rocking in her bed with her hands clamped over her head, chanting, "No! No! No! No! No!"

"Come on, Phoebe," I said. "The alarm is going off. That means you need to get up to go potty."

"No!" she said. "I choose hold it until morning!"

"Alas," I said. "You still have to get up so we can change your underwear and reset the chummie, so you may as well go potty. If you want to choose to hold it until the morning you can't let any pee slip out."

So, that's what we did. 

But last night—the alarm didn't go off a single time! 

Phoebe woke me up at 6:30 am to ask if I could help her go potty—she'd held it until the morning!

"Barely," I thought (a little sad about being robbed from my last little while of sleep before my own alarm clock went off, especially after sleeping with one ear open, listening for her chummie through the night).

I'm really hopeful that we're almost to the end. She's been wearing the chummie and underwear to bed for about a week and has made many improvements.

Benjamin might just keep his title of Most Difficult to Potty Train (because he'd just sleep through the chummie and would wet the bed entirely in spite of the alarm, which Phoebe so far hasn't done). 

Here's hoping!