I Suppose It Would Keep the Monsters Away

Ellie still wears pull-ups to bed.  No big deal; she's only four.

Some mornings she wakes up dry, some mornings, not so much.  It's a gradual process.  We went through the same thing with Vicki, but by the time she was six, the pull-ups were a thing of the past.

It's Ellie's job each morning when she gets up to take off her pull-up, go potty, and put on her panties.  If the pull-up is dry, she puts it back on her dresser for the next night (hey, those things are expensive!) and puts a sticker on her chart for staying dry all night.  If it's wet, she's supposed to bring it downstairs and throw it away in the big trash in the garage.  She often forgets that small detail and I keep finding nasty wet pull-ups in the bathroom trash.  We discuss this on a regular basis.

Or we used to.

It occurred to me yesterday morning that I haven't seen pull-ups in the bathroom lately.  I also have not noticed Miss Magoo carrying her pull-ups to the garage.  Nor, come to think of it, have I seen an upturn in the number of stickers on her chart or a downturn in the number of pull-ups being used.  I've definitely still been buying them.

So I asked Ellie where she's been putting the pull-ups these days.  She said, "Oh, under my bed.  I'm storing them there."

The first question that comes to mind is, storing them for what?

The second question is, wait, where?  Because she actually doesn't have an "under the bed".  There's only about three inches between the bottom of her bed and the floor, and I blocked it with 2x4s last year because I was tired of stuff getting shoved under there.

So, um, where exactly are the pull-ups again?

She showed me.  She lay down on her back the floor, shoved her feet against the mattress, and lifted.  And it immediately, and quite fragrantly, became very clear where she'd been putting them.

I pulled 10 of them out from under there.  Most of them were not re-usable, but I threw away even the ones that might have been.  I didn't actually check to find out.  We'd moved beyond frugality at this point.

We had a chat.

There is no longer such thing as under Ellie's bed.