Quick Change Bed Sheets For Night Time
Night time potty accidents are inevitable. We all wish it would never happen, but when you are potty training a toddler, they will wet the bed a few times before they master this new skill.
When my daughters graduated to ‘big-girl’ underpants, I dreaded the idea of stumbling into their room in the middle of the night to strip off soggy sheets and tinky-soaked jammies. It’s a pain to change the sheets on a toddler bed in broad daylight when you are well rested. Add darkness, sleep deprivation, and an upset toddler to the mix and you have a recipe for stubbed toes and banged-up shins.
I did a little research and came up with a better plan…
Since a few night time potty accidents are bound to happen, I looked for the fastest and easiest solution I could find for changing a bed sheet. My first ah-ha moment came when I realized that I really didn’t need to protect the whole mattress, just the middle area. The head and foot of the mattress were well out of harm’s way. Instead of changing the whole bed every time, I decided to add a second set of quick-change waterproof bed sheets to the middle of the mattress.
You can purchase waterproof bed sheets and there are people on the web who sell patterns for quilting your own potty training sheets with a waterproof backing. But if you use a 3 day potty training approach (like we did), you really only need the sheets for a few days. It’s not enough to justify spending a lot of time or money on the sheets. You just need something absorbent for the top and waterproof for the bottom…
…my solution, thick bath towels and a cut up vinyl table cloth with a felt backing.
We laid out a table cloth cutout and covered it with one of the bath towels. The whole thing was folded with the table cloth part on the outside so that we could set it in the center of the bed and the whole package would unfold in place and only need to be tucked in on the sides.
Each night we kept a small stack of these sheets packs in the bedroom and placed a fresh one across the middle of the bed – prime tinkle territory.
When an accident happened, I snatched up my girl, stripped off her wet clothes, and set her on the potty. Then I quickly stripped the potty sheet of the bed, grabbed a fresh set, popped it on the middle of the mattress, flipped it open, and tucked in the sides.
It’s a simple solution that handled the situation with minimal trauma and let everyone get back to sleep quickly.
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Tags: accidents, bed wetting, overnight, special tips
