Stubborn

All kids are stubborn at some point, some more than others. Sometimes when you are tired and want to give in, they can sense it and they dig their heels in and become just a little more stubborn until they get what they want. This is a story of course about Josh..my easy one.

I think Josh has been pretty pleasant as little boys go. I admit I could be blinded by the "baby of the family" phenomenon that magically excuses all his mischievous actions as cute and innocent. But this is not so cute although it might be innocent. Josh still has a tendency to wet the bed at night. Great, a lot of kids do at his age, I realize this is a common problem. The issue is that Josh wants to be grown up so bad that he refuses to wear training pants at night. This has been a battle for what seems like a year now.

We used to wait until he went to sleep to put the Pull-ups on. He would wake up in the middle of the night and cry that they were on. I would wait until he fell asleep and put them on again, and that would take us till morning. He then moved into a phase were he would wake up in the middle of the night, quietly remove the pull-up and change into underwear and not let us know he had changed. We would wake up and find him with wet sheets.

Next phase, we (meaning me, Mike mostly sleeps during the night of course, why wouldn't he, it is night time - duh -) decided to wake him up during the night to use the bathroom. This seemed to solve the problem, but my problem was that I wanted to sleep through the night too, just like my hubby :). So here we are again, Josh still can't make it through the night every night, so we went back to the training pants. Here lies the problem, Josh refuses to wear pull-ups. I did find these cool boxers that look like big boy pants, but are to be worn at night. I brought them home and told Josh if he wore them the whole night he would get a toy.

He seemed excited about the toy and tried on the boxers. As he was stepping in to them, he said, "Hey, there is a diaper in there!!" My reaction of course was to deny, deny, deny and convince him that his brother will wear them too so they could be twins..Brett relented and wore them until Josh fell asleep.

The next morning, he asked for his toy and had no complaints. The next night as I got the boxers out to put them on again, he refused. "I don't want those anymore!" he said. I told him if he didn't wear them, he could not swim the next day. He loves to swim...The next morning, after I cleaned his sheets, he changed into his swim suit and asked to go swimming. I held my ground and told him No! No training pants, No swimming! He asked, "Can I go swimming tomorrow for Brett's birthday?" I told him he could, because we were having a party for Brett. He then said, "Good, lets start the party today!" Good try Josh, but again, No! That night, he did wear his training pants.

So far, we have had two nights that he has successfully worn his pants and I have not had to clean his sheets. Also, I have received a fairly good nights sleep...So we are all happy. This has been a year in the making and I'm crossing my fingers that it lasts for at least a week!!