Parenting comes with its joy but it can sometimes be
stressful for the parents most especially when you still have your children
living under your roof as babies, toddlers, teenagers etc. I love sleeping and
I always believe that I cannot compromise my sleep for anything else and that
is before I got married and started having children. By the time I started
having children, I discovered that I could do without sleeping and this was really
amazing to me because it was a new experience for me, that I was able to hear
my firstborn child (my only daughter) cry while I was sleeping. Wow! It was
really an experience and this was about 12 years ago because she will be
turning 12 by the next 11 days, isn’t it amazing?
Sometimes I sit down to go down memory lane at how far I
have come as a mother of 4 children – a girl and 3 boys and I discover that it
has its exciting moments and it’s not so exciting moments. One of the
experiences that I will love to share with you is that of helping y children
get over urinating on the bed while they are sleeping at night and remember
that I had told you earlier that I love sleeping. It wasn’t really a wonderful
experience. I never really thought much about helping my children get over the
habit of urinating on the bed bit until they went for a sleep - over and my
friend later commented on how my children (I still had 2 of them at the time) still
urinate on the bed at the ages of 4 and 2. I was like “wow, aren’t they still
young?” She replied me by saying that “her
children don’t urinate on the bed again”. This really got to me but I refused
to let it show and I made up my mind that I will work on my children.
The steps I took to help them
1. Dinner: I ensured that they never ate dinner later than 7 pm
so that before they went to bed by 9 pm, they would have urinated very well. It
wasn’t easy to keep to this timing then as a full time working class mom living
in Nigeria where the power supply is erratic which makes it nearly impossible
for you to prepare your food and put in the freezer or refrigerator. I had to
start waking earlier by 4 am to prepare the meals so that by the time we come
home in the evenings; I will only need to warm the food. This helped a great
deal.
2. Night calls: the next step that I took was to start waking
them up once at night, I ensured that they urinated before going to bed by 9 pm
after which I wake them up by 1 am to urinate before I finally wake them up by
5 am. Once I wake them up, I take them straight to the toilet because I knew
that they will be pressed. This helped also although it wasn’t really easy
because I had to keep adjusting the alarm clock for the first 2 weeks before my
body adjusted to waking up at this time.
I will really say that these methods worked well for me and
I did it for only 2 to 3 months before my children started waking up on their
own between 12.30 am to 1.30 am to make use of the toilet at nights. I will
also state here that starting this routine wasn’t easy but because I was
determined to be a proud mom, I kept at it and it paid off.
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