Amber: The toilet training experience

Just when we thought we had fully toilet trained Amber for the night, she goes and wets the beds (yes, not just hers but also Nigel and Shannon's) two nights ago. However, I think that was a one off as it was a late sleeping night and she had lots of green tea.

But how did we get here? Wasn't she the one whom we could almost guarantee would soak her mattress each night no matter what we did? Yes she was. For some reason, at some point, I had this impression that she would never be trained. But she eventually did learn how to control yourself, and this is how we did it.

Firstly, we had to make sure she peed just before going to bed. And this would mean forcing her to go even if she insisted that her bladder was dry. "No Amber, go and pee". "Ohhh-kay, but I told you I don't have any pee". And she sit there, and we'd hear a lot of gushing sound. I wonder where that came from.

Then we would bring her to pee again before we went to bed. This might be around 1am. I'd wake her up, and make her walk zombie style to the toilet - Celest would carry her, but she wet me once as I was carrying her and it's been zombie style ever since.

Finally we would have to specifically set alarm clocks to wake us at around 4am so we could bring the little zombie to the toilet. Each time we do that, I'm reminded of a friend who joked once about making prank calls in the dead of the night to people and asking them to go and pee when they pick up - maybe his parents trained him this way and subliminally that thought strayed into his prank call messages.

In the morning, if she did wet her bed, she would come into our room and declare the unfortunate incident. Sometimes her elder siblings would do that too, especially if their mattresses (they all sleep side by side) or bolsters or soft toys were unintentionally soaked. Once, a care-bear became the pee-bear had to be left swimming in the sink.

We've not gotten a morning declaration in a while now, and we have also done away with the 4am alarms. So things are generally going the right way - just have to keep her away from the green-tea bottles.