Golden Slumbers
I apologize to Linus in advance for this one.
A week or so ago, as I was putting Linus to bed, he told me that he didn't wear pull-ups anymore. This was news to me. For some months now, Linus has been a sort of potty-training werewolf. By day, he is a mild-mannered young boy who has mastered his bodily functions, more or less. This development has led to a great enrichment of his life in the form of various types of underwear (Batman, Spiderman, SpongeBob Squarepants, Harley Davidson, and so on). I can assure you that when I was a youngster, we didn't have those kinds of fancypants fancy underpants. Oh, sure, there were Underoos, but for reasons I don't understand those were never present in my dresser drawer, something I intend to take up with my parents and therapist at our next meeting.
But by night, Linus is still a bit unrefined in the ways of the potty-training. Basically, he seems to have a bladder the size of an Earthball, and he doesn't wake up whenever he needs to go. Thus, the pull-ups, which are like diapers but are not diapers, and if you call them a diaper, you'll have trouble.
And though Jane and I have looked forward to the day when he would leave the pull-ups behind, we knew that he was not yet ready, and we weren't going to press the issue. A lot of other kids his age in his school still wear the pull-ups at night, and so we didn't think there was any hurry.
But for whatever reason (which I will reveal below), Linus decided recently that he no longer wore pull-ups. "Oh," I said. He seemed very sure of himself, and so I figured there was no harm in starting the process, especially if he was so into it. It seemed sudden, but these kids these days, who knows why they do what they do?
First night, he wakes in a puddle. We change him up, change the sheets, he goes back to bed in the big bed with us.
Second night, same thing.
Third night, same thing.
Fourth night, same thing, except he also puddlefies our bed before morning.
Fifth night, same thing. We're making beds and changing linens so much it's like we're in boot camp.
I'll save you the suspense of a daily progress report, because there isn't one. We've tried having him go before bed, we've tried cutting him off all fluids for 24 hours before his bedtime, and we've given him bedding made entirely of rubber and vinyl. No dice.
Each night, I would ask him if he was going to wear a pullup, but his cheery and matter-of-fact answer was always the same: "I don't wear pullups anymore." Meanwhile I'm thinking, "No, you don't, but is that really a victory? Is sleeping in urine every night really a step up?" All I knew was that I was getting tired of doing cleanup duty every night, and more than that, now we had to have a big rubber sheet on the big bed, just in case he had another accident when he was in with us. Listen, I don't know how many of you have to sleep on top of a vinyl sheet, and I don't want to know, ever, but it's not comfortable. It makes a lot of noise whenever you move, and it makes your whole body perspire in unnatural ways. It's like sleeping in a deflated blow-up swimming pool.
Well, I say "whole body", but that's not really accurate in our case, because we don't have a legit vinyl sheet. Jane couldn't find one that fit our king-sized bed, and so instead we have this vinyl table-top cover that isn't shaped at all like our mattress. So, in an effort to cover up those areas most likely to be impacted, we just spread the thing from one side of the bed to the other, about two feet down from the top. In other words, from my armpits to my knees I have to sleep with a tarp-like material just under my sheet, which completely insulates my body and doesn't allow it to breathe or perspire naturally. I wake up every night with the mid-section of my body in a sweat, but with cold feet and a head so close to a window that has actual frost forming on the inside that it's as though my body has it's own climates and weather patterns.
A few days ago, Jane and I broached the subject of broaching Linus with the subject of him perhaps not being ready for pull-ups. It's touchy, because you don't want your kid to fail at a big step like that, especially when it was his idea. And that jogged my memory a bit, and I asked Jane why she thought he was so gung-ho about the pull-ups all of a sudden. And she told me this story:
The weekend I was in Milwaukee, Jane and Linus went over to some friends' house for the evening. These friends of ours have a daughter in college who was home for the evening. She's the kind of woman that inspires boys to want to spend time around her, and Linus seemed to agree. He spent virtually all of that night playing in the general area where she was. He was apparently rather insistent about it. Then, later in the evening, he insisted on sitting next to her while everyone was watching TV. At that point, the near two-year old son of another of our friends went through Linus' night bag, found his pullup, took it over to Linus and plopped it on his lap, right in front of the suspected object of Linus' affection. The horror! I guess this didn't play well, as a couple people in the room noticed it and had a laugh about it. I don't know that Linus did or said much at the time, but I can't think too many dates that have included an unwanted revelation about urinary problems have ended well.
Linus didn't say anything about his pullup that first night, probably because he was too traumatized, but the next night was when he first made his declaration to me that he was no longer a pull-up wearer. I think it's obvious what happened here. Linus was perceptive enough to know that chicks don't dig the pull-ups.
I figure all we have to do to get him back into them is let him know that they generally don't dig guys who wet the bed, either.
12:12:55 PM 
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