Overnight and during naps, Evie got the brilliant idea to start taking her diaper off before falling asleep, which inevitably led to a wet bed. Washing her bed-clothes multiple times a day started to get pretty old. In an attempt to fix this problem, I told her if she needed to go potty, she could call me, and I would come help her. This was one of those instances where the cure was worse than the affliction. Pretty soon she was calling me down every few hours, all night long, even though she hardly ever really had to go. The frustration with this situation led me to utter a statement that I immediately recognized as a mistake:

“Evie, I’m not coming back down here again.”
“What if I have to go potty?”
“Well then, I guess you’ll just have to go on your own.”

Hoo boy.

After that, she was coming out of her room constantly, always taking off her clothes, always crying when she got her shirt stuck on her head or dropped her pajamas in the toilet. In other words, this was the worst, least manageable stage of all.

I should say that all of this was combined with (and/or responsible for) Evie starting to not take a nap anymore. She’s in sort of the awkward, in-between stage where she sometimes goes without a nap, but then has an extremely cranky, sleepy, rest of the day.

I have a theory on parenting. Lets call it the “sine wave of parenting difficulty”.

Basically, every 6 months your child goes from reasonably easy to parent, to reasonably difficult. Not necessarily naughty, though. It could be they change their sleeping habits, start teething, reach a stage where they are whining, or pushing boundaries, or potty training, whatever it is. The tricky part is to remember to appreciate the peaks, so you can get through the lows.

So anyway, a perfect storm of not sleeping, mischief, potty issues and a push for independence is sort of making this one of those parenting troughs. I wasn’t sure what to do. On the one hand, both Evie and I were losing sleep for no particular reason. On the other hand, I didn’t want to tell her NOT to go to the potty, because I would eventually like her to be able to go the night without a diaper. So how to break the habit while simultaneously not encouraging and not discouraging?

Finally, Sara came up with the answer – potty tickets! Evie gets two potty tickets per night (one for naps) which she can use to go to the potty. When she’s out of tickets, she has to go in her diaper.

Evie loves it. She is so excited to use the tickets. By the time I get down there, she’s dancing on the bed, waving her ticket around and saying, “Daddy, take my ticket!”

At first, the tickets were just little scraps of paper. Sara had a second stroke of inspiration when we were on the train the other day, and now the potty tickets are actually old Metra tickets

It’s still not ideal. She uses the first potty ticket within 5 seconds of being put to bed. After I put her into bed I close the door and wait, so I can go back in immediately. She rarely has to go that soon, so she’s still stalling there. Consequently, we have had to move her bedtime up to compensate for this.

Other than that, though, it works out pretty well. It’s a tolerable balance between what I would optimally like to have and where we were just a few days ago.

And that’s all you can really ask for, isn’t it?