Photo: iStockphoto
?We’re gonna have to burn that mattress,? I said to my husband.
He gave me a look. ?Again"?
Our five-year-old was a bed-wetter. He potty-trained pretty easily when he was two-and-a-half, but never seemed ready to follow suit at night. Now, at age five, he was still wearing pull-up diapers to bed. They were often dry in the mornings, but it felt like whenever we decided to go without one, he’d wet the bed. And truth be told, the pull-ups often leaked anyhow.
I wondered if it was because he sleeps so deeply?you could drive a truck through his room and he wouldn?t rouse. Even a soaking wet bed didn?t wake him. Most of the time, it was I who discovered the wetness when I checked on him. So I?d pluck him from bed, lay him on a blanket on the floor, change his clothes and the sheets, and put him back to bed. He’d never even stir. Our doctor reassured us that it?s not actually unusual for a five-year-old to wet the bed. But we were motivated to solve the problem because it was starting to bother him, which made it bother me. (Plus, we really were going to have to burn the mattress.)
My best friend told me about bedwetting alarms. These devices go off when a child starts to pee, which wakes them up?the idea being that if the kid is repeatedly awoken after a few drops of urine pass, they’ll be conditioned to respond to a full bladder rather than releasing it. This means the kid will either wake up once he is “cond...