I jerk awake, my adrenaline rushing. I fumble around searching for my phone. What time is it? Oh crap. It may be too late. I nudge (or maybe slightly harder than that) my husband awake. Now I shake a little harder. “Lorin, grab (insert child name here)!” You’d think we were about to miss a flight with our rapid but clumsy movements. Sometimes we are lucky and grab our child right before they have an accident. Sometime we aren’t. And those nights are the worst. My husband and I tag team getting the child all cleaned up and changing the sheets. We were getting to a natural rhythm and it became part of our routine to have a million sheets in our laundry room. I kept thinking that here had to be a better way (Friends, anyone?!) I was getting eaten alive by the mounds of sheets and dirty laundry from all those accidents.
After several weeks of this madness we decided to be proactive. While our kids were fully potty trained during the day, they couldn’t help their pea sized bladders. We gathered some tools to help us deal with these accidents and hopefully put an end to them. It really was pure madness.
1.Waterproof Mattress Cover + Mattress Liners: Of course we hope that everything is soaked up by the blanket around his legs but in case it isn’t, at least the mattress is protected. Or is it? Sometimes it would soak through so we started putting a mattress cover, 2 liners that span the top of the bed as well as the bottom because our kids move around like crazy. On top of the liners, we put the fitted sheet. The liners are much easier to change than a mattress cover (unless you have this mattress pad) so you could layer those on if you want to be extra careful. We have several liners as we put a couple down on each bed for any emergency like if they get a stomach bug.
2.Easily removable sheets: Let’s be honest. How often do you want to just throw a towel on top of the sheets because in your delirious sleep deprived mind because you just want to sllep? Well, it is a quick fix. However, you may want to consider using the QuickZip sheets. These are so easy to zip off and change so your sweet little one doesn’t have to smell or lay on pee. Plus they even have these soft fleecy type material that is heavenly. And let’s not forget how easy they are to change on bunk beds. You just put the set on once and just zipper around to place a new sheet on. No more trying to lift up the mattress or scarping your hands against the dang side of the bed. We didn’t have these when all the madness happened a while ago but they would have made those late night sheet changes a heck of a lot easier. We have them now and I can’t go back to regular sheets. I love it because it is useful all the time not just specifically for potty training.
3.Training Pants: While potty training you won’t want to revert to a heavy diaper like pant (like pull ups) and if the child is old enough he may not even want to wear pull ups because only “babies” wear those…in their words of course. Underwear with a little bit of padding helps absorb any minor accidents and your child won’t feel embarrassed and will still feel like a big kid. My kids would fight me on wearing pulls ups and that’s when the accidents would happen.
4.Bed Wetting Alarm: Night after night, we found ourselves changing bed sheets and waking up to take our child to the bathroom. Nights when my husband traveled were incredibly difficult for me because my kids are tanks and I have no upper body strength. Pulling them out of bed to use the bathroom was torture. I finally found Chummie and it was freaking amazing. There are different settings to wake up the child as soon as any moisture is detected. With our kids we used the vibration setting and the attachment on his shirt would buzz to wake him up. You press the button to make it stop. In less than a week, our son was able to train his body to wake up as soon as he felt the urge to use the bathroom. I actually contacted them about their product and even spoke to the CEO. They are very passionate about what they do and helping kids recognize the cues their body gives them. They have an amazing program to help those that can’t afford to buy this- if you are interested go to their website and email them. Their customer service support is amazing.
5.Rewards: Something like this also helped our kids. We would give them 2 jellybeans if they didn’t have an accident. It doesn’t hurt to bribe, right?!
After using the Chummie we stopped having accidents. However, we continue to use these bedding products on our beds because it makes changing sheets so easy- even the bunk beds!
Our friends at QuickZip are honoring Autism Awareness Month by offering 10% off all orders (from their site) for the entire month of April with the promo code AWARENESS and donating a percentage of their April sales to organizations that help individuals and families affected by Autism.
If you have any questions about these products let me know! I still can’t believe we went through all of that and having some of these products would have made the madness easier.
QuickZip + Chummie provided product for my review but opinions are 100% my own.
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