The year has been eventful for us in many ways. If we have to find one other thing that we can be thankful for, it’s this. Amos’ potty training was a huge deal for us this year. The circuit breaker period was an opportunity for us to start weaning Amos out of diapers and we did just that. Whenever anyone asked us about how it went, we had but one word: dreadful.
The going was arduous, and on hindsight, it was such grace that brought us through the times we wanted to give it up. We’re glad we didn’t, because as the year 2020 comes to a close, we couldn’t have been happier to declare Amos officially diaper-free!
Flashing back 9 months, I recall the moment we’d wake at 6 A.M., our heads foggy with sleep, our hearts laden with the approaching workday, agitated by the rush to get the kids ready for school, and we’d enter their room to find Amos sopping wet and ice-cold in his bed. He’d be stubbornly asleep, drenched in pee from his belly down to his socks.
With scarcely thirty minutes to spare, we'd launch into a manic but coordinated operation of whisking him to shower, preparing breakfast and laundering the sheets. We'd tell ourselves we had prepared ourselves for this. No complaints. We gritted through all that for a day, a week, then two...
But the bedwetting just kept coming with no end in sight.
And there were nights when Amos wet himself not once, but twice. Amos was off to bed by eight-thirty and by midnight we’d be showering him and changing the sheets. Then again at six. We kept it up for a couple of weeks and no more. By then our blood pressure could’ve powered pistons and I couldn’t tell the difference between alphabets and sentences.
It simply wasn’t sustainable, so we started actively waking him up at midnight to release the load. For a while it worked, until it became somewhat a hit-and-miss affair. We’d enter his room at the stroke of midnight to find him dry, only to have him sit at the toilet for twenty minutes without releasing a drop. The next night we tried entering 15 minutes past midnight only to find him drenched. Sometimes, he'd wet himself even before midnight. It became such a game of lottery that we began dreading the moment.
Darn…it’s midnight. Rock, paper, scissors—hah, your turn!
There were also nights when it happened thrice. Yes—you heard it right. After cleaning up the midnight mess, at the witching hour we'd wake up to the sound of him tossing in bed (he thrashes his head about and it’s that loud). We would enter his room to the same horror, clean up the same mess, and repeat all that at 6 A.M.
We read all the articles we could find, spoke to people. We reduced his water intake, abstained from it 2 hours before bed, then 3, even when the poor kid started haggling us for it. That didn’t work either. The pee schedule remained erratic and after almost a month of trial and error, we figured that we probably had to be scientific and clinical about managing Amos’ water intake. And I mean being really regimented about it too.
We estimated his hydration requirement by his body weight, drew up daily feeding schedules and kept notes on how it affected his pee schedule. Cause and effect, right? Right—except we also had to manage Amos’ antics and comfort level and get him to comply with the regime. It required god-like patience not to go ballistic on him. Every bedwetting or refusal to pee at the toilet was a tremendous exercise in restraint. I had to learn to employ sternness (to make him understand it was unacceptable behaviour) but not abandon myself to rage. A feat for the fatigued and sleep-deprived.
It was about 2 weeks before we worked out a decent pace that allowed Amos to pee consistently—once around midnight and once at 6 A.M. The pace required feeding him larger quantities of water in the early part of the day and reducing them towards the end, then abstaining completely about 2 hours before bed. We took note of every bedwetting and respond to them by making small schedule adjustments, until incidents fell from 3-4 times a week to once a week, once a fortnight and so on.
We reached a steady-state around May 2020, when Amos got used to the regime and finally caught on with the need to hold in his pee after enduring weeks of sodden discomfort in his soiled bedclothes. In the weeks after, we woke him up daily at midnight to pee and there was almost no bedwetting in the morning, except for the couple of days when he had diarrhoea—which, without diapers, was a sight that pretty much left us shell-shocked (I’ll save that for another time).
Then, just as we thought we had achieved clockwork—Amos refused to pee at midnight.
He reverted to the old habit of perching on the toilet seat and dozing for almost an hour without shedding one drop. It was a nasty regression and the 6 A.M. bedwetting resumed and we wanted to tear our hair out.
Left with no choice, we sat with him at midnight, determined to keeping him awake and spurring him on, sometimes to the point of falling asleep ourselves. To cut a long story short, it worked roughly 70% of the time; he urinated and we sent him back to bed feeling accomplished and victorious. For the times it worked, he woke up dry. For the times it didn’t work, there were the occasional accidents, but then there were dry mornings too. And that meant one thing: that kid managed to hold it in from dusk to dawn. No midnight pee and no morning bedwetting.
This was as good as it got. We kept up the midnight runs, often with our patience stretched to the verge of snapping, then it was back to bed, and we'd pray for the best in the morning. Over the next 4 months, the frequency of midnight urination fell and the number of dry mornings increased. It came to a point when Amos plainly refused to pee at midnight and completely exhausted our patience.
Finally, in end-September, we took the gamble and stopped the midnight runs altogether.
The bedwetting went up slightly. We were disheartened, though a sliver of hope kept us going and we were grateful for that because we learned it was but a teething phase in the process where Amos' body and subconscious began settling into the habit of holding in urine until the waking hour. There were misses, but the hits started coming back. It took probably another month, and by November, we had the feeling that we were reaching the end of this tunnel.
In all, the process took about 7 months, and we are immensely thankful because it could've taken much longer. The end of one journey is the beginning of another, and soon we began training Amos on toilet independence. Sandra came up with a stamp-and-reward system as a means of motivating him. He gets one stamp each time he relieves himself unassisted. He gets enough stamps and he gets a cake. And it works like magic because Amos is a cake monster. We're still working on this.
It's rather insane—I know, but here's a HUGE disclaimer: this is about Down syndrome and by no means instructive in any way. We’re only sharing our journey and every family will experience this differently with different duration and degrees of success. If it’s any consolation to parents of kids with Down syndrome going berserk over toileting woes—take heart! because it will lead somewhere, and you’re most definitely not alone in this.
So stay calm and potty on.