Going diaper-less

My son received some adorable little boy undies (boxer briefs?) for Christmas and the last two days I've experimented with having him go diaper-free. I haven't been brave enough to attempt letting him sleep without a diaper, but when DS is awake, I've been putting him into the underwear. This actually only amounts to about six or seven hours a day. So far we've had two accidents and three successful eliminations. The first day I found out something I'd long suspected, that DS likes to pee when he's sitting in his high chair. Actually, both accidents took place in the high chair. But I learned from that, and now when he gets the glazed over look and stops paying attention to the food, I know he's about to go and can whisk him to the nearest potty.  This is something I wouldn't have figured out if I hadn't attempted to go diaper free, so I feel like it's already paid off, especially because the cleanup from the accident was minimal. (There is very little carpet in my home.)

I recommend trying this out when you have a couple of days where you don't have to leave the house, I think it would be too stressful to try to watch for your baby's signals when you are out and can be distracted by any number of things. Actually, if you could turn off cable and the Internet, that would help too. Seriously, though. I found that being right with DS the whole time he's diaper-less made me less anxious because I was able to really look for his signs.

I also realized that I want to find a physical sign for him to use to tell me he has to go. Sometimes he pounds on my arm or chest repeatedly - it's a very specific tapping sort of thing - and I think that has to do with his potty needs, but be doesn't do it every time he needs to go, so I need to either encourage that more or start my own sign and start using it consistently. Any ideas?

The Pee-Nightmare Connection

Since he was about six weeks old, DS used to start screaming as if in extreme pain in the middle of the night. He would cry, go red in the face and howl with his eyes closed. There was little I could do to soothe him though he would calm down after several minutes and drink a bottle of formula before falling back to sleep. After this continued intermittently over the months, I did a search on "baby nightmares" and found Dr. Greene's site about night terrors in which he explains the pithy terms "confusional arousals" and "nighttime dryness." Apparently these night terrors are brought on by the urge to urinate or the desire by the child to stay dry while sleeping. Once I learned this, I would put DS on the potty when he awoke crying (or screaming) and sure enough, he would pee, often having held quite a bit of liquid in his bladder. Now that he's older (11 months), however, he tends not to wake up in such an agitated state and often when he does wake up, his diaper is already wet and he just wants to be changed and fed. But it was interesting to learn about the link and that it could help some parents who are puzzled by sudden night terrors by their infants or toddlers.