Adventures in Daddyhood - The Midnight Pee

Potty training wasn't an easy process for me. It was 2 years of frustration followed by Drew training himself in like 2 days. 2 years of me fiddling with plastic toilets, rushing him to the bathroom when I thought something was coming, threatening to take toys away, offering other incentives, bribes, etc. Then one day, Drew decided that he was going to use the toilet. Well, that was easy.

Toilet training was one thing - but making it through the night was another. Well after he was potty trained, Drew had a tendency to wet the bed. I don't think there's anything wrong there, he just doesn't have control over his bladder at night like some of us do. And even 30 year olds sometimes make an occasional mistake. Nobody's perfect.

But Drew was a special sort of challenge. Over the last few years, he's gotten used to certain things, like being able to drink all the water he wants, whenever he wants. It's probably a good thing to encourage. But he likes to take a long, deep drink right before bed. You might see where this might be a challenge.

On my mom's advice, we started getting Drew up out of bed to pee in the middle of the night, as we would go to bed between 11 and 12, and Drew is generally put down sometime around 8.30. It's the funniest thing - he usually doesn't even wake up. He zombie pees in the toilet, sometimes he'll have a post-pee shiver, we pull his pants up, and he goes back to bed. He never remembers it the next day - he literally sleeps through the whole thing. And he never wakes up wet when we do this, even when we sleep in on the weekends. Nice.

Occasionally there are incidents, and I'll go ahead and sacrifice my dignity for a few laughs here. At the old house, I think the toilets were bigger, the seats had more "hole room", whatever it was, peeing was easy, as Drew would sink his netherregions into the pot and ne'er a drop was spilled. Now that we're in the new house, maybe it's new, efficient, smaller toilets, or maybe that Drew is getting bigger, but he doesn't exactly sink down anymore. And last week, it resulted in him spraying all over me when I sat him down to go. He didn't do anything wrong, he was sleeping when it happened, so he didn't even get to enjoy the comedy of the situation. I just toweled myself off, put him to bed, then took a quick shower before I went to bed.

Since the soaking incident, I've become more careful. But tonight was a different kind of funny. I took Drew in for the usual night pee, and pulled his pants down, and he pulled them back up. Eyes completely shut this entire time, even though I stood him up on his own to prep for this. I pulled his pants down again, same thing, he pulls them up. I'm quick, and I get the pajama bottoms down, and he stands there and makes sure his underwear are up and snug. I quickly de-pants him, and everything goes as normal. I didn't even get peed on. And he never opened one eye.