Potty Training

This whole potty training thing is gonna do me in.  Not because it's hard, but because it's exhausting.  On good days, when the berrykin wants to go, he goes...often.  Like three times to fully empty his bladder once.  Which means three to four trips to the bathroom in ten minutes.  Aside from being frustrating (and hard on my skin, with all that hand washing), I'm usually okay with it.  At least he's going!  Some days, he goes maybe twice all day.  We've all been slacking on helping him, so we've been having more of those days recently.

No, the hard part is at night, when his bladder wakes him up.  Night before last, he got up six times in an hour.  Most nights, he gets up three to four times.  They're almost always during my window of care, too, between bedtime and when Jeremelon gets home from work.  So I don't generally get to go to sleep until Jeremelon gets home, somewhere between 2am and 4am.  And then Berrykin gets up for the day at 7.  So Jeremelon takes a nap, gets up with him, and lets me sleep until 10:30 so I can get six or seven hours most days.  Then we switch.  Which generally means neither of us ever feels rested, and we have very little time in a day when we're all up and home.

This morning, I awoke at 8:30 to find Berrykin up to his elbows (literally) in the toilet.  From what I could piece together, he'd gone potty all by himself, then dumped it in the toilet like he so enjoys doing.  Then he'd emptied the roll of toilet paper into the toilet and flushed.  Except it didn't go anywhere.  So he fished it all out and put it in the trash can.  Because he's a big helper like that.  Jeremelon had fallen asleep on the couch, so he had no idea.  Thankfully, the bathroom we use for potty training is the master bath, so I frequently wake up to potty sounds and know the difference (in my sleep, no less!) between assisted pottying and unsupervised potty playing.

I just got a part-time retail job in time for the holidays (yay! No, really.  While I swore to myself never again, retail, we need the money, so it's a good thing), and I will be getting up at 5:15 several times a week.  This really screws up our "normal" schedule.  Thankfully, the Anderpiller moved in with us last month, so he's going to be our part-time nanny.  Still, I can't go to sleep at 3 and get up two hours later and expect not to go insane.  Which means we need to get Berrykin to sleep through the night.  Which means we have to quit the night milk (I was SO CLOSE this summer, but then everybody got sick and he needed the fluids).  Which means many sleepless, screaming nights.  Normally, I like to space out the trauma we cause him for his own good.  This time, though, we might have to go all out and combine the Supernanny's Cry It Out (which worked when he was littler) and night weaning.  

Ugh.  So not looking forward to that.  But I don't have orientation until Thursday, so I guess we have the time.

::whimper:: Sleep is possibly the single hardest part of regular parenting...