Being a mother has taught one so many things. Patience. Unconditional love. Effective time management. The biggest thing you may be learn as a parent is that the most precious commodity in the world to a family with small children isn’t time or money. It’s sleep. Sweet, sweet uninterrupted sleep. You may also realize that as for someone who has been pregnant, nursing, and raising kids for the better part of a decade ,there is only one thing worse than being woken up at 4 a.m. and that is being woken up by something preventable, like overnight diaper leaks.
If your baby has a diaper leak in the middle of the night, the traditional options have been to 1) replace the crib sheet with a clean one in the rare case your sleep-deprived brain has remembered to keep a spare, or 2) do laundry and sob. (You can’t just drape any old blanket on the bare mattress and say “see ya in the morning”—it could be a choking hazard.)
- Go up one diaper size for nighttime sleep
Your baby’s current diaper size might be all right during the day, but a size up could be just the solution to stop leaking at night.You see, a regular-sized diaper works during the day because you change him more often. It’s also snug, which is important when he’s awake and mobile. But a larger diaper size at night works not only because he’s less mobile, but it can absorb more than his regular size.
- Add extra protection
Don’t want to change wet sheets or soaked pajamas? A simple hack to prevent overnight leaking is to add extra protection for the existing diaper.
For instance:
Add a pair of fleece shorts over the diapers before dressing him in pajamas. While he might leak through the diaper, the shorts can absorb some of the wetness.
Double up on diapers. Place your baby’s regular sized diaper first, then add a larger sized diaper on top.Insert booster pads like these into the diapers to hold even more wetness.
- 3. Use nighttime-specific diapers
Day time diapers might not be cutting it for nighttime. If so, choose nighttime diapers specifically for sleep. These are more absorbent than daily ones, and are designed with sleep positions in mind.
4.Make“crib sheet lasagna”
Make sure that the larger diaper is still snug enough at night. You don’t want space around his thighs that could leak, for instance.
However, you can can save yourself from either of these situations by making “crib sheet lasagna.” No, I don’t mean you should numb your pee-stained sorrows by stuffing your face with lasagna. This is how crib sheet lasagna works works. Before bedtime, you place a waterproof mattress cover on the mattress, and then a regular crib sheet over it, and then another waterproof mattress cover over that, followed by another regular crib sheet. (You can keep going, if you’d like, until it gets too bulky.) Get it? Multiple layers, like lasagna. Then at night, when your baby has a diaper leak (or gets sick and throws up), you simply pull off the top sheet and mattress cover, toss them in the hamper, and go back to sleep.
Alternately, you can use puppy training pads in place of waterproof crib sheets. After a leak, just take off the top sheet and throw out the puppy pad, and you’re good to go.
If you’re experiencing a string of leaks, however, you’ll want to address the problem at the diaper level. Try making a double diaper, adding a diaper booster pad or moving up to the next diaper size. As a parent, there will be plenty of reasons you’ll be awake in the middle of the night. May leakage not be one of them.