Bye bye diapers

River has been doing quite well with the potty at home recently. In the past few weeks, he has been giving us advance notice of when he needs to go. When we ask him if he wants to go potty, he’ll often say yes when he has something. So I think it’s about time to try to get rid of the diapers entirely during the daytime (sleeptime is another matter. He still supersoaks them regularly. I read that kids can’t hold it at night until their brain starts producing a certain chemical, so we’ll leave that one on hold for a while).

I took him out of town over the three-day weekend, during which we used disposables. I noticed that he was much more willing to pee his pants in the disposables compared to the cloth. I’d repeatedly ask him if he needed to go potty, he’d say no, and then I’d later find a full diaper. That doesn’t happen with the cloth diapers, probably because it’s so uncomfortable to wear all that pee against the skin.

It’s a little risky to make the jump right after a couple of days in disposables. I expect we'll have at least a few accidents. But I'll give it a month and see how it goes. I'm most concerned about excursions in public. That is really where we're making the leap b/c he's been doing quite well at home for a while now, but we always put on a diaper when we go out. It doesn’t help that the library story room floor is carpeted. The plan is to give him an opportunity to go before we leave, bring along a towel (to clean up accidents), a plastic bag and a spare pair of pants. Perhaps I’ll also carry the Bjorn potty along, since he’s still not comfortable going on a big potty seat.

I wanted to make the transition clear to him. So when he woke up this morning, I told him he was a big boy now, so we’d be saying goodbye to the diapers in the daytime. I asked him to help me put the diapers into a bag to put away. He did so, we filled the bag, and I carried it out of the room. It took about two minutes.

I think removing the diapers (we left the power diapers for sleep time) is as much for our benefit as his. Without them there, we can’t resort to them if we start to struggle a bit. It means we all have to be committed to helping River make his big boy transition work, because there is no fall back.