How We Stopped Nappies Leaking At Night - a SUPER approach!
Parenting is hard. Waking up at night is hard. Waking up at night to a baby that has soaked through their vest, onesie and sleeping bag is really really hard.
When O was about 9 months old, this started happening to us night after night, derailing all our sleep training efforts and adding to our already enormous laundry pile. We knew we had to come up with a solution.
It was fun to dust off my brain in the depths of maternity leave and find a use for my skills as an improvement consultant, even if it was on a mini project like this.
My SUPER strategy for improvement
Over the years working in improvement, I've developed my own strategy to help make the improvement process easier. I call it SUPER. It was nice to use it in my own life to solve this problem:
S is for Start
Start is the first part of my strategy. It seems minor, but I think it's important to commit to a project and come up with a goal.
Together, we set a goal of keeping him dry all night, every night.
It was also important to recruit my team for this project. This means I had to get my husband on board - he was more than willing! We acknowledged out loud that O soaking through his clothes at night was a problem for us and decided we needed to fix it. We committed to testing different things until we had solved it.
U is for Understand
Too often we jump into thinking about (or even trying out) solutions without really thinking about what's causing the problem. This was definitely the case for us. We had all kinds of ideas on how to fix the problem, without really understanding why it was actually happening.
When he first starting soaking through his nappies, we were convinced that it was a simple problem: too much liquid going in causing too much liquid to come out. As he was on medication, we needed to give him milk during the night, so it wasn't an option to reduce this. We needed to explore other options.
Spend some time really breaking down why you have this issue
I spent some time reading online forums and chatting to other parents who had experienced the issue. Of course everyone I spoke to had a different opinion on what the best solution was! I took all their suggestions on board and created a list of potential causes.
This gave us so many ideas to work on, from the size/shape/fit/absorbency of his nappies to his sleeping position (he's a tummy sleeper).
Once we had done this, we were both on the same page regarding needing to test some changes and also had an idea of what those changes might be.
Here is the list of ideas we came up with:
Nappy Absorbency
Overnight nappy - nappies marketed specifically for keep little ones dry overnight.
Absorbency booster - an additional pad that that you can add to your nappy.
More absorbent nappy - most brands have a "+" range in the same sizes, just more absorbent.
Nappy Application
Nappy technique - are we putting it on perfectly despite the wriggling?
Change during night feed - hopefully this would gift us a few more dry hours in the morning.
Change right before bedtime - the idea was that this would capture the wee created from his nighttime bottle.
Nappy Shape/Style/Brand
Try bigger size - this has been the main culprit for us with night time leaks. It usually means we need to go a size bigger at night.
Try different brand - different brands vary in terms of shape and size. As kids grow, their proportions change around, so different brands may fit better at various stages. I love Rascal and Friends at the moment as the absorbent liner seems to come up higher than other nappy pants.
Try nappy pants - elasticated waist and cuffs protect against movement. Also I recently saw an ad that resonated with me about babies going to bed with full tummies (think bedtime bottle) which shrinks down overnight, leaving space for leakage - it suggested that elastic waistbands prevent this - seems plausible to me!
Other ideas
These are some ideas that did not make the cut, as I didn't think they were appropriate for us:
Reducing liquid during the night - This was not an option with his medication.
Reducing water before bedtime - This was not an option as I .
Change sleeping position - I have no idea how we would go about this.
P is for Prepare
We had lots of similar ideas, but they were all a little bit different and we wanted to be sure to only test one thing at a time.
This is crucial.
If you change more than one thing on a particular night and there is no leak, how do you know which one of the changes led to your success?
We needed to create a strategy
Using the list of ideas, we were able to create a testing strategy on one page. I made a driver diagram for this as it is a neat visual way of working out all the potential things that are driving your issue:
It was really simple to make:
We listed all the ideas that we had for solutions e.g. overnight nappy, more absorbent nappy, absorbency booster
We grouped them by category e.g. nappy absorbency
Then grouped the categories together e.g. nappies
Then grouped the categories into bigger buckets e.g. liquid out
Once we had the driver diagram it was easy to see how the different ideas related to each other. This meant that I could rule out the ideas we definitely couldn't change (i.e. how do you change tummy sleeping!?) and work out the best order to test the other ideas.
E is for Experiment
We tested so many different things before we found the right solution.
We couldn't reduce liquid by cutting out the night feed as he was on medication that meant we had to feed him every 6 hours. Instead we tried less milk in the overnight bottles. This made no difference.
We tried changing his nappy again right before bedtime. Previously we had done this at bath time. Our theory was that this would hopefully catch some of the wee produced from his bedtime bottle. This didn't work either.
We got super careful about how we put on the nappies, making sure the frilly bits were all pulled out and that the sticky tabs were equal on both sides.
We tried using nighttime nappy pants. This was a soggy disaster.
We tried using nighttime nappy pants as a second layer over the top of his traditional nappy. This worked but was really bulky and kept a lot of moisture next to his skin.
We added an additional absorbent pad inside his nappy. This kept him dry but ended up all bunched up in the morning and must have been really uncomfortable.
We tried a bigger size nappy. THIS WORKED!!! He was still in size 4 nappies during the day, but size 5 nappies at night solved our problem!
R is for Reality
Once we had found the solution that worked for us, we committed to buying size 5 nappies and made sure that they were stocked near his pyjamas so that it would be easy to remember use them every night.
Make your solution a part of your everyday life, but stay alert as things are always changing.
The size 5 nappies worked for us for a couple of months, but recently he started waking in the morning with a damp tummy, or wet on his sides. I immediately thought about going up a size, but he wasn't big enough for size 6 nappies.
We recently tested nappy pants at night, and so far so good! My theory is that the elastic moves a bit better with him during the night but that's just a guess.
Always be ready to start tweaking things again!
My SUPER approach
Start
Recruit your team
Decide on your goals
Understand
Research possible causes and solutions
Prepare
Decide what to test
Experiment
Test your ideas (one at a time!)
Reality
Find ways to make the changes part of your routine
Always be ready to start tweaking things again!
Happy Experimenting!
