start nights with toddler? how? (yes, ANOTHER night thread!)

[LCBMAX]

My nearly-daytime graduated 20 month old son has never been truly ec'd at night. We tried a few toilet offerings over the months, none since about 14 months, but it always provoked crying and wakefulness. As an infant he was in frequently-changed cloth diapers at night, and since about month 8, he's been in feel-dry disposables, which only get changed if there's a leak or if we're up anyway for one of his nighttime parties that he likes to have for the full moon. Our scene is co-sleeping, extended and frequent nursing, and overall crummy sleep for me, but he does well enough if I just keep the breast available.

I am revisiting the thought of nighttime ec because
1. thirty disposables per month still feels wrong
2. gee, I'm up anyway!
3. maybe his nighttime wakefulness is as much about toileting as it is about comfort nursing, verbal development, etc.

So, wondering the following:

if you have a day and night graduate, but never nighttime ecd, when did your lo graduate at night and what did it look like?

if you started nighttime ec during/ after daytime graduating, what worked or didn't work?

does it make any sense to just start as if he's a newborn and I'm learning his signals from the start (warm room, naked, cueing when I notice peeing, and move on from there to positioning, etc)?

would this layering protect my mattress: mattress, wool blanket, mattress cover, fitted sheet, 2 layers wool blanket, 1 layer fleece or cotton, and cloth prefold with belt on baby? (ok that sounds paranoid, and I'm really very pee friendly, but it's a great expensive mattress, so...) will his beloved sheepskin really survive repeated misses if we use that too?

do some of you just part-time ec at night? on a schedule instead of just cues? or is that antiquated coercive toilet training?

is there any reason (other than his absolute refusal and my sleep issues) to NOT try to ec at night? (like, daytime grads do it naturally, or boys don't nighttime grad til later anyway, or the astrology is wrong right now, or???)

Sorry - so many q's, and I know nobody has loads of time... if you can answer any of these, or have other thoughts, I'd be grateful and glad to hear it.

[lisavark]

Ah...subbing. Replace "feel-dry disposables" with "feel-dry pocket diapers with multiple inserts," and I could have written your post. My DD is also 20 months and has always protested any nighttime EC violently. And she was staying dry all night for a while, but I was never up early enough to reliably catch her morning pee, so I've never really gone diaper-free at night. (The couple of times I did, we got a wet bed.) So...ack! I hate the fact that she's wearing underwear during the day and piling on the diapers at night. It just seems silly. Could be teething...or food issues; I'm pretty sure we have some food issues going on that I don't want to face...anyway, no ideas here, but looking forward to hearing good advice from others!

[pixiepunk]

well, here's my experience, hopefully some of it might help?

i didn't nighttime EC either one of my older two kiddos. DD1, who i started EC with at 9 months was a night time grad about 4 months after she was a daytime grad. i had night weaned her during my pregnancy, which did not seem to have an effect on her night peeing (meaning, it didn't seem to lessen any). she wore a 7th Gen sposie until she was about 18 months, at which time the guilt set in and i switched to pockets (i CD'd during the day, but had trouble keeping her from peeing all over the family bed using CD at night). once she was a daytime grad, she started waking up dry more and more often, and protesting night time diapers more and more. so i told her if she could wake up dry for at least 2 weeks, we'd stop doing diapers at night. it was a couple of months where the time between night peeings got longer, until finally i realized it had been about a month and took the diapers off for good. once she was consistently dry, she was able to wake up and tell me on the rare occasion she did have to pee (which was not the experience prior to that. she might've squirmed or something, i don't know, as it wasn't something i had been paying attention to).

DS i started EC with at 6 months. he was actually dry at night before he was during the day. consistently somewhere between 18-20 months. for him it did coincide with no longer nursing at night, though i didn't wean him, he naturally stopped nursing at night at that age... so i assumed that was the difference, and had more to do with sleeping more deeply and for longer stretches (both the dryness and the weaning). so that was about 4 months prior to being consistently dry during the day. just like with his sister, once he was consistently dry at night, when he did have to pee he was always able to wake up and tell me he had to go. again, i don't know if he squirmed or did other signalling at night... i just wasn't tuned in to it. he wore pocket dipes at night, or AIO's, after the newborn period.

DD2 was different - since i EC'd her from birth and she was such a strong signaller, i started night time EC at around 2 or 3 months. she was often dry all night even at that age, and was quite consistently able to either be dry all night or tell me she had to pee (by kicking me in the stomach ) by 4 months. i don't know if i would've stuck with it if she peed 6x a night, but 0-1x per night i could definitely handle! i let her sleep in undies or nakey now, have since she was about a year old. maybe 4 times since then she's peed in the bed, mostly because her tossing and turning didn't sufficiently wake me. now that she talks, she usually just yells "pee pee!" and that generally wakes me up i keep a little potty bedside.

[pixiepunk]

oh, and wanted to add that our sheepskins have survived quite a lot of pee and are still in great shape. i do wash them occasionally, but not until they've gotten wet at least 3 or 4 times. they're going on 6 years old now, and one of them i actually bought gently used, and they're still in perfect shape.

[Aletheia]

I'm bumping this up, but adding a complication: I have a preschooler who, while we have EC'd at night on and off since birth, is still not a nighttime grad.

[LCBMAX]

Update from OP

Well - I have sort of started something, with very surprising results.

First of all, typical of my own neuroses, I totally overdressed the family bed: above our fitted sheet are 4 - yes, 4! - sets of wool blanket/flat sheet pairs. My thought was that if there was a miss in the family bed that couldn't be covered by a prefold, I could just peel off that top layer of sheet and wool, and there'd be another ready to go. Obviously, I was expecting LOTS of misses. There has not yet been a miss in the family bed, because....

I put my son to sleep on his little bed next to ours, in a pocket cloth diaper, on his sheepskin, and that happens around 8. I come to bed around 10, and at his first wake-up after that, he comes into the family bed. I can easily check to see if the cloth diaper is wet yet, and if it is, I toss it out into the darkness to be found in the morning. If not, I wait til I "miss" that first diaper pee. Once I find him wet, off comes the diaper, and he sleeps nakey-butt in the family bed til morning. I usually discover the wetness around 11 - 1am.

Here's the surprise - he doesn't seem to pee again after that first "miss-in-the-diaper". In other words, there seems to be just one peeing event in the first half of the night, and that's it til morning. And unlike me, he doesn't need to race to the toilet when we wake up - he'd rather play and nurse and tumble around in the bed for up to 15 minutes before he's willing to go with me to pee, protesting all the while "No pee." Once I've gone, he's interested in using the toilet too, but gone are the sympathetic pees on the bathmat from hearing me go.

Either I'm sleeping through it, or there is no signaling for that first pee. So,
next on my list of self-challenges is to offer him a sleepy pee before that first miss. If this elicits crying and wakefulness, I'll just try again in a few months - I can live with one wet cloth diaper a day! And when I'm getting it on him, and he's understandable resisting the diaper, I can let it be on imperfectly, since a leak is just makes a miss easier to find.

So... that's my long winded update. Pixiepunk, thanks so much for your detailed review with your experience. It was such a help to be reminded that things will be as they will be with each individual child - that really freed my mind up for experimenting.