All aboard! Time to find out why we love Mother-ease cloth training pants!
The twins bought one-way tickets for the Potty Training Train and Mommy the Conductor isn’t issuing refunds.
With preschool starting in September, I took away diapers in June and we haven’t looked back.
Full disclosure: they have not mastered getting 100% of poops into the toilet and neither twin is consistently dry overnight. BUT we drove thirteen hours to and from Vancouver without a single accident, so that’s good enough for me. I promise that once they’re into the swing of preschool and I actually have a couple of uninterrupted hours to myself during the week, I will share our full potty-training story.
Reusable training pants are the one “tool” I use to help my twins learn to use the toilet. They weren’t into using the little potties I had for my older kids, and for once they made my life easier by immediately being willing to use the big bowl. For my final potty-training journey as a cloth-diapering mama, I was excited to try Mother-ease’s Big Kid Training Pants and Bedwetter Pants. Mother-ease’s cloth diapers were a big success for the twins, and Mother-ease is by far my favourite made-in-Canada cloth diaper brand, so I was pretty confident that their training pants would be a success.
Mother-ease Big Kid Training Pants
Mother-ease Big Kid Training Pants look just like regular underwear. They have a waterproof outer and an absorbent bamboo terry inner. My twins have a 5-lb (2.3 kg) weight difference, so one fell into the size small range (25–33 lb/11.3–15 kg) and the other in the medium size range (33–40 lb/15–18 kg). I found that they could each use both sizes interchangeably, although the mediums left a little bit of a gap between the legs of my skinnier twin.
My experience with cloth training pants (I tried many brands on my oldest for the purpose of the blog) is that they work best if the child lets out a bit of pee, remembers they need to get to the toilet, and the rest of their pee makes it into the bowl. I have never used a pair of daytime cloth training pants that successfully contain an entire pee. Because I used a bunch of ineffective strategies when I was potty-training my firstborn, he very often would gleefully (or perhaps absent-mindedly) release a full pee in his cloth trainers, and he always soaked his pants (or the floor). Mother-ease describes their training pants as “Completely Leak-free—absorbing up to two accidents,” but I did not find this to be true. The (thankfully few) times that one of the twins completely forgot about the toilet while wearing their Big Kid Training Pants, they peed right through them.
However, I don’t consider this a failure on the part of the training pants because if they did absorb two full pees, then they would be functioning exactly like diapers and pretty much defeat the purpose of teaching them to use the toilet. It’s important to know that if your child is prone to fully peeing their pants, these cloth trainers will not protect your couch or your car seat.
In the first month that the twins were working on their potty skills, our Mother-ease cloth trainers were a perfect solution to the fact that I was not willing to follow them around all day, ready to scoop them off to the toilet. The trainers caught the occasional dribble on the way to the loo, or the wee squirt released when mommy thought they were just normal yelling instead of “I have to pee” yelling, and that meant a lot fewer pairs of pants in the laundry. Because they still haven’t perfected their potty poops, the trainers are also a good way to catch a code brown without it seeping onto the sofa or into their shorts.
I know that some families manage to day-train and night-train all in one go. This often involves waking up to wet sheets a few times a week or carrying the kid to the toilet for a somnambulant pee-pee right before the parents go to bed. You could not pay me enough money to risk waking up one or both of the twins either to make them pee or to clean up their pee.
Before I took away diapers, one of the clues that the twins would be ready was that they were waking up dry many mornings. Now that we’re out of diapers in the day, we try to get them to pee right before bed, but don’t actively limit their liquids before bed or overnight because one of the only times they will drink water is at bedtime, and for reasons of constant constipation … I need them hydrating. At this point, they aren’t woken by the urge to pee, and frankly I don’t really want them to be. They wake up dry about 75% of the time, and I’m not worried about continuing to use their overnight cloth trainers until that percentage reaches a consistent 100.
Mother-ease Bedwetter Pants are the only overnight cloth trainers I’ve tried that actually absorb full (large) pees. They are a solution both for kids who aren’t night-trained yet and for kids who struggle with bedwetting. Unlike their daytime training pants, these reusable training pants are crazy absorbent. They are very fluffy and thick, definitely not discreet, but they are extremely effective. I haven’t had to change pyjamas or sheets overnight, and this is worth the weight of a pee-filled cloth training pant in gold.
Because these trainers absorb so much pee, it’s important to wash them well and often. Mother-ease recommends having two pairs per child to ensure frequent washing. Because we aren’t washing full loads of diapers anymore, when a twin pees overnight, I rinse their trainer out thoroughly and then just wash it with regular laundry (using my trusty Tide detergent). Because these trainers are so thick, they do take a long time to dry. If you are line drying you will need more trainers because you simply won’t have enough time for them to dry between use if you are rotating between two pairs.
My smaller twin is under 30 lb (13.6 kg) and his brother is 35 lb (15.9 kg), and they both fit in the XSmall size (30–40 lb/13.6–18 kg). It’s important to have a relatively snug fit, because if there are big gaps at the leg you’ll definitely get leaks.
According to Mother-ease, these trainers absorb 625 ml (21 oz) of liquid. I have never measured the volume of my twins’ pees, but they have never out-peed their Bedwetter Pants. Because they go up and down like undies, they don’t seem like diapers to the twins, and we can go to the bathroom before bed with ease. (This is also great for older kids who may get up to use the toilet.) Mother-ease Bedwetter Pants come in sizes fitting all the way up to 65 lb (29.5 kg).
All Aboard the Potty Train!
If your potty training train is about to leave the station, and the thought of spending big dollars and filling big garbage bags with disposable pull-ups gives you engine failure, Mother-ease’s made-in-Canada reusable trainers are really going to blow your whistle. It seems only appropriate that I now encourage you to choo-choo-choose Mother-ease.
Shop:
You can find Mother-ease cloth training pants as well as their other awesome reusable products at Mother-ease.ca.
To support my blog, you can also shop via my affiliate link to Lagoon Baby.
Leave a Reply