Oh my God the peeing!

Jacob wakes up this morning and we both want to snuggle so I move him toward me by pulling on the two double-layered blankets that I carefully folded beneath him last night, slowly revealing a huge wet spot. Give me a break already. This has been happening for months now.

Before I even go into the details, let me just say that I firmly believe buying a water-proof mattress cover will immediately solve the problem because like a rule of nature, the wetting will stop once I have purchased said cover. And if by some chance the wetting does not stop, then the worst-case scenario will be that the sheets still get covered in urine but the mattress is saved. This isn't even an option for us though because I have no idea how much one of those would cost to fit a toddler bed, let alone a party-of-three queen-size bed. Also, the mattress is already urine-stained in a million different places, and I'd still have to wash the sheets anyway.

What I really want is a second mattress cover, as in just the soft, padded one that goes under the fitted sheet. Add that to the extra sheets that I actually do have and voila, you can just change the bed instead of washing everything and waiting for it to be done before re-dressing it. I had two and like an idiot I gave away the extra one to the animal shelter last year because it was old and there was no room to store it (having a freshly torn apart bathroom back then, our 'linen closet' became open shelves in Jacob's room and I was still naive to the fact that it would most likely stay there for the rest of our time in this house). Even with a second mattress cover, I still think it would be a rule that there is no changing of the bed in the middle of the night. We're too exhausted to do anything productive then. So, if the puddle is discovered while it's still dark outside, someone grabs a towel from the bathroom and we lay it over the wetness and pretend it's not there. If we don't discover it til morning, then a mild attempt to soak the urine out of the mattress is made, but who are we kidding? It's all the way down there, it's not coming back out.

If a towel has been layed out in the middle of the night, then it usually stays there for the duration of the day...I forget about it, or I'm too busy to wash the sheets right then, or I keep saying it's going to be my next thing. So by the end of the day when all we want to do is get into bed and then we notice the towel laying over the now-dried pee, well, by then it's like, we slept in it last night, what the big deal about one more night? If we really care that much then we'll peel off the offending layers and just sleep on top of the flat sheet. Maybe this will go on for two or three more days, I can't say for sure, but I can say what is a fact is that Jacob will mostly likely NOT pee in a bed that already has pee in it. He will, however, pee on the night of the day in which I have finally broken down and washed the sheets.

I have not yet had to wash these new sheets (the freaking cozy bamboo ones that I got for Christmas) just because it's time to wash the sheets. Each and everytime I wash them, it is because there is pee. For a while I was putting a disposable diaper on Jacob at night, covered by a bulky cloth diaper. This worked on most nights but then one day I just decided that after three years of washing cloth diapers, I just wanted to stop already. I guess this was about the point when Jacob stopped wetting at night anyway. Sometime soon after that he starting wetting again and one measly disposable was no match for the liquid capabilities of my son. More recently I guess I've begun experimenting with other methods. A few weeks ago I finally splurged on the expensive nighttime diapers. I thought it was my golden ticket so with complete confidence, I put Jacob to bed with nothing under him. Flooded. I bought bigger size pullups to go over nighttime diapers. Yes, Jacob now wears a 2T nighttime diaper, covered with a size 6 Bob the Builder pull-up. This only works on half the nights. Beckie recently gave me diaper doublers...something I had luck with in the cloth version when I was a still a green-diapering mama. I tried them for the first time last night, hence the puddle 'o pee when I pulled Jacob toward me today.

I'm going to the store today, I'm going to buy actual baby diapers, not pull-ups. I'm thinking tonight I'll go with the nighttime diaper, lined with a double/BtB pull-up combo. Triple protection. Yeah right, Jacob's bladder will laugh in the face of that. Anyway, I have little hope it will work...I'm going to start looking into catheters (kidding). The only thing in question now is, will I change the sheets today?

*Stands up* "Hi. My name is Stacey...I sleep in urine."