No more nappies?

We have been trying to get Liem dry at night for a while. We waited for him to be "ready" ie having dry or almost dry nappies in the mornings. This NEVER happened. Always a big fat wet nappy in the morning. We tried several times to let him go without nappies at night. He would be really excited the first night and make it through but on subsequent nights he would be so tired that he just couldn't wake up to do wees and there were "leaks". Our talented child even managed to leak ON his doona once and another time had TWO leaks in the one night. As we only had 2 waterproof mattress protectors, this meant the washing machine got started in the VERY early hours of the morning. And back to nappies for Liem...

When he turned 5, we decided we just had to bite the bullet and make a real effort to get him dry at night. I bought another 2 mattress protectors, we used towels, we reminded Liem several times to go to toilet at night if he needed to do a wee, we left the corridor light on for him... I had to do SO MUCH laundry. It didn't help that we were having a wet winter and clothes just took longer to dry. The dryer was on almost every day. We woke Liem up in the night to make him go to toilet. And you know what he did? He CRIED! It was so ironic that when he was a baby he cried because he couldn't sleep - we had to train him to sleep and now he cried because he didn't want to get up. We had a few incidents of Liem getting out of bed, sitting on the floor for a few minutes and then climbing back into bed without going to toilet. Once, after crying like mad and Daddy CARRYING him to the toilet, he did a wee but forgot to take his underpants off. Another time after having a leak, I left him to get changed, he put fresh underpants over the wet ones and WENT BACK TO SLEEP. We only found out when I noticed him wearing two pairs of underpants in the morning.

Liem has stopped drinking at night and has been dry at night for over a week now. Can it be that we are finally free of nappies???