For the past day or two my sons have been borderline with a stomach flu. You know what I mean – they give me poopy diapers more than normal, and once or twice it was obvious that it was diarrhea that my boys were giving me. I said to my husband that I would sneak into their room before I went to bed to give them a sniff test – if you have children you know what I mean, and if you have more than one child in diapers you’ve probably done it yourself – to see if I needed to change a diaper.He says to me that I shouldn’t change their diaper if it was dirty – I should let them sleep and that sleep was more important. I was horrified. I didn’t want my child to be sitting in a dirty diaper for hours. So I decided to go online and do some reading to see what is the accepted practice.

From what I read there seems to be two schools of thought. There’s the one like me that says change a poopy diaper right away. The other school of thought says you should never wake a sleeping baby for a diaper change, no matter what. Slather on the diaper rash cream before bed to protect from diaper rash and change the diaper first thing in the morning.

A lot of the articles I read said that if your child can get back to sleep easily then it might not be a problem to do a diaper change in the middle of the night. If your baby is young enough to still have feedings during the night you can change them first and then do the feeding – they should be pretty sleepy after eating. Don’t put on the lights. Lights will distract the child and cause them to wake up. Practice changing the diapers by the light of your child’s nightlight to minimize the chance she’ll wake up.

So where does that leave me? Unless it is really obvious that they have a mess in their pants I’m not going to run the risk of waking them up. If they are sick enough to be pooping overnight then I’m going to take care of them. If it takes them a while to go back to sleep then I’ll deal with it.