Diaper Free

Posted on 10.28.09 to Clare, Parenting by Joan

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My diaper free baby.

One thing I was worried about, before Clare started attending school, was that she wasn’t potty-trained. Till I found out that at her level, it was alright that she still wear diapers and her teachers will sort her out if she soiled them. During orientation, I also found out from another parent that the teachers at St James Church Kindergarten would help out with the potty-training. I was very relieved because I wasn’t sure when and how we were able to do it at home. (This is a huge bonus from the school, and I’m especially grateful to her teachers for this.)

The general rule of potty-training is to keep a strict regiment: send your kid to the potty at regular intervals so she gets used to the idea of going to the toilet to do her business. What makes it work is keeping it consistent. Since I work and my hours are erratic, I felt awful having to implement this rule on her caregivers since they were already doing me a favour by looking after her. Putting them through potty bootcamp seemed like a rather tall order.

I also felt that I didn’t want to push my daughter if she wasn’t ready, hence I let her develop at her own pace and subscribed to the belief that she would let me know when she was prepared to lose the diapers.

Sometimes, over the weekends, we tried using the timer method on her. We’d set the kitchen timer to ring every 15 minutes and would herd her off to the potty. I know it isn’t a consistent thing, but we thought we might try anyway. Also, at that point of trying, her teacher had already informed us that Clare’s been regularly requesting to go to the toilet, despite wearing diapers.

The turning point came this April, when I just came back from Bali. Clare suddenly declared that she was done wearing diapers. Her dad, initially, wasn’t sure if it was a good thing, but I reminded him that even though she might have a pee accident every once in a while, it was important that we back her up especially after the fact that it was she who decided against wearing diapers.

It was a good move because since then, she doesn’t wear diapers during the day. Of course there was the occasional peeing on the floor, especially during playtime when she doesn’t realise the urgency to go pee till it’s too late. But soon after, those accidents stopped too.

Lately, she has been changing her own diapers at bed-time each time she pees in them. We’d be in bed, either reading or playing, and she’d suddenly scamper off the bed and insisting that she wants to change her diaper because “it’s wet”.

So last night, I asked her if she wanted to wear panties instead. She nodded her head. We both reminded her that if she wants to pee, she would have to wake us up, and she said, “Sure”.

This morning, she woke me up at 3AM to go to the toilet. Waking up in the middle of the night was not fun, but in my terribly sleepy state (am still recovering from a horrid bug that made me ill for 1.5 weeks), I felt a huge surge of maternal pride that my baby girl has achieved yet another milestone in life. Without much fuss.

She was an easy baby to look after on the whole, she still is an easy child to look after. I’m keeping my fingers and toes crossed that the same rule applies when she goes through her teenage phase.

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