[mom2dara]

Hi Ladies!! I need some advice from the experts!

I have a 9mo that I just recently started ECing. Everything is going pretty well with her and I am getting many catches/day but here is my dilemma -- she seems to be getting up more times a night than before to pee!!

When she arouses at night I immediately get her to the pot to pee because her diaper is dry. She is breastfed and I am used to getting up with her 1-2x/night to feed her but since we started getting into an EC routine she seems to have increased her wakefulness to every 2-3 hrs. Is this normal??

It seems to be a vicious cycle because after I potty her I feed her to get her back to sleep, so, that's more liquid in to pee out in 2-3 hours when she awakens again.

For anyone who has been in a situation like this what happened? Will her sphincter eventually mature to where she can hold it for longer and longer periods without having to pee at night?? At what age does this happen?

I hate the thought of reverting back to her infancy days when I got no sleep at all!!!!

:

thanks for any advice

 

[wendypf]

DD is 4 months old and she recently went from waking every 3 or so hours to pee to longer stetches -- she did 9 hours last night -- though she woke up crying cause she needed to go so bad.

Not sure this helps, but we've been ECing since birth w/nighttime pottying. In the last few weeks she's become very demanding of pottying at night and it wasn't until this week that she started having longer stetches.

 

[aikigypsy]

Generally my 12-month old pees 3 times a night, about every 3 hours. However lately it's sometimes more than that, with her new ability to drink from a cup (after only nursing with rare sips of water between 6-12 mos), lots of miscellaneous upheaval in our lives, and head colds etc. She had several dry nights around 2-3 months but that phase didn't last long.

I think maybe teething messes it up? We've had a few really wet nights lately and I'm thinking of giving nighttime EC a rest, despite having done it with some success for the past 10 months. Getting up to potty, even just for a minute to the side of the bed, is annoying her a lot lately.

 

[lexmas]

DS is two, and he still needs to pee once in the middle of the night. I know that's not what you want to hear...if you need some sleep, take a break for a few nights and then go back to it!

 

[andtay23]

DD is 10mo and goes every 2-3hrs. Sounds normal to me

I think slowly her sleeping cycles are getting longer. Hang in there!

 

[mom2dara]

Thank you mamas, good thought on the drinking more water phase. The other night she went once which really threw me off and last night she went twice -- go figure. It sounds like "sleeping through the night" is a fantasy at his point but as long as her bum stays dry I am happy! I have forgotten what sleeping through the night feels like anyway so we can go through this together !

 

[newmum35]

I have no advice for you because I have been in the same situation for the past 13 months! We started EC at one month old, and he is now 14 months. It probably took 7 or 8 months before I realized, he is waking a gazillion times per night, NOT because he is hungry (he is still breastfed, and does need to nurse to get back to sleep usually) but because he has to pee! (and doesnt want to go in diaper) - I will never EC again if I had another child.. It has ruined my sleep and made a vicious cycle for us for the last year. It does work out well in the day, but the nights are a nightmare lol If I ever was brave enough to try early potty training again I think I'd wait to at least a year old when it was established that it is OK to pee in the diaper at night! lol Maybe if he had learned to NOT nurse during the night, then he would stay dryer at night, and only pee maybe once or twice. BUT he has to nurse in order to fall asleep again and the vicious cycle goes on... *sigh* I tried so many things - tried stopping the EC at night, tried various ways to reduce night feedings, etc - in the end, we go back to whatever he wants, and whatever time he wants it LOL

 

[EdnaMarie]

Mine always slept through the night despite EC- she either peed in a diaper, or didn't pee, but she had long stretches from the get-go. She also night-nursed which was fine until around 18 months, when she was awake every hour. (???) Frankly, I think night-waking is related to a child's depth of sleep and sleep cycles and not to EC training. Also, we started from the beginning and we also saw these off and on wet night, dry night things.

When you're in the midst of it you want to solve the problems and find a cause but in retrospect, a lot of it is probably just genetic. I know plenty of people online whose children were not EC'd but whose sleep is a disaster.

 

[sapphire_chan]

Newmum, it might not have made a difference. I decided to do EC at night in part because it was so easy to tell that she needed to go--because she'd kick me until I took her.

Lina's 4 months and has been dry a few nights (midnight-6am or so) I expect it's a phase.

 

[tankgirl73]

Things we've learned in our 2-year EC journey:

Sometimes she'd pee every couple hours at night, sometimes she'd go all night with no pee at all. It would tend to go in phases, 2 weeks of crazy pees, 2 weeks of desert dryness, repeat, for instance.

Nursing or no nursing, makes no obvious difference in pee frequency.

Sometimes when she wakes up, she doesn't have to pee, just needs to nurse.

Sometimes when she wakes up, she doesn't have to nurse, just needs to pee.

The trick is learning to differentiate between the above 2 lol...

She's now turned 2 and is a 100% graduate. She still wears trainers at night just in case, we call them "bedtime bum". If it's been a couple hours since her last pee when she goes to sleep, then the first time she weeks, I'll potty her. Otherwise I just ignore her bum and nurse or cuddle back to sleep. Once recently she even said "pee!" with one of her wake-ups. This was after a phase of a LOT of peeing in the bed, her "last hurrah" before graduating. Then one night she woke up and said "oh, mess! pee in bed! oh, wet!" and hasn't done it since. She just hit that point of consciously realizing she didn't like that.

She is dry all night now, maybe every 2nd or 3rd night with one potty during the night. We don't even do the urgent morning hurry-to-the-potty wake-up pee either, we wait for her to tell us when she has to go, and sometimes it's even HOURS after waking up, despite nursing several times a night and no pee since the night before.

So -- hang in there! Pee her when she needs it. It will get better... then it will get worse... then it will get better again... repeat lol. It's all part of the learning process. All my sleepy nights were SOOOOOOOOOOOO worth it!!!

Oh and to newmum -- I'll second that it might not have made a difference. Many mums don't realize that night-time wakings can be due to the pressure and discomfort of the need to pee, rather than other needs, so they struggle with these unhappy and wakeful babies and can't figure out what they're doing "wrong"! And I'd rather have a few months of frequent wakings, than teach my baby that it's "okay" to pee in the diaper at night, and then later have to teach then that it's not okay anymore and they're expected to stay dry... so much easier this way in the long run, the pain is short-term!

Also, if the waking is really frequent, it's worth looking into things like food sensitivities. DD will pee like a waterfall when she eats fruit, just about any kind of fruit. I don't think of this as an allergy or any kind of NEGATIVE food sensitivity (though some EC gurus do), it's just a diuretic for her. At some phases, she'd lose all communication during these "pee frenzies" and go unaware in her pants or on the floor. Fortunately, she's now 100% even during the "frenzies".

Also... even the greatest EC moms have occasionally ignored a need to pee when exhaustion was looming heh... we've all dealt with changing the wet diaper at night because we didn't wake up in time or just chose to ignore it *this one time*. That's very different from deliberately leaving a baby to eliminate in diapers all the time. We used prefolds with a prefold belt at night for quick and easy changes, I could even change her without waking her up!