Since the moment Evie was born, we have struggled to get her to sleep. This has been a long term, large scale war, not a single battle. Sometimes we’ll do something to get the upper hand, but something else always eventually comes up, putting us back to square one. Currently we are in the middle of just such an uprising. After a long lull, Evie has been getting up multiple times per night, either to get a drink of water, or to go to the bathroom.

This is usually just after she goes to bed or right before she is supposed to get up. She gets lonely and wants a little human contact, and she has realized that saying she has a potty emergency is an irrefutable excuse to get up. The problem is that Evie’s middle name is “you-give-me-an-inch-I’ll-take-a-mile”. After letting her go to the potty for a few days, it started to be more and more frequent, and earlier and earlier in the morning. So she would start waking up at 5, going potty, and then staying up singing at the top of her lungs until it is time to get up. I was starting to go crazy.

We re-instituted the potty tickets, which worked for a second or so, but then she quickly went back to her old ways. She would use the potty ticket the first time she wanted to get up (usually 10 seconds after going to bed), but then she would get up later saying she had to go again. The problem is, how do you not let her go to the potty? She always goes when you take her to the potty. She really does have to go. The only quibble is how bad she actually has to go. This is a nuance that cannot be explained to a 3 year old. “But daddy, I went pee pee and poo poo!” To her, that’s the end of it; she said she had to go, and she did. And quite frankly, if she says she has to go and then she does in fact go, who am I to say whether it was an emergency or not?

We even tried bribing her. For every night that she doesn’t use her potty ticket, she can have a dime towards her book orders (the big reward du jour). “I’ll get it tomorrow,” she says, handing me her ticket. If she could at least go by herself, she would lose interest in it, but she won’t go by herself. And it’s a little hard to avoid her when she comes in to go while I’m taking a shower in the morning.

The thing is, I know she doesn’t really need to go. Until recently she went all night, no problem, and didn’t even have to go first thing in the morning. So how do I let her go when she has to go, but somehow not “reward” her by giving her attention, to the point where she drops this and moves on?

The only other idea we have is to get out her old potty and leave it in her room, so she can go if she needs to, but doesn’t get to wake everybody up, etc. Maybe we’ll give that a try.