Saturday, November 26, 2011

What you are going to see may shock you


It's a baby playing while NOT wearing a diaper. It's crazy. I know.

And, yes, he is laying on top of a puppy piddle pad (they are Gert's left over ones).

At our last La Leche League meeting one of the other moms mentioned how she practiced EC with her daughter.

Me: Huh? What is eecey?

Her: Elimination Communication.

Me: Huh? Like when you let a baby cry it out?

Her: Elimination as in poop and pee.

Me: Hmmmm...

I was curious what the hell she was talking about, so I looked into it and downloaded The Diaper Free Baby onto my kindle.

It was a quick and easy read (okay, I didn't real alllll of it. I skipped the chapters that pertained to older babies). EC is sometimes called infant potty training, although the hard-core ECers refrain from the word training, because it is not about training it is about increasing communication with your baby. Whatever.


The idea is full on hippie shit- so you know I am down with that. The basic idea is all babies are born with the innate desire not to to soil themselves and some control of their bladder/bowels. That's why newborns ALWAYS pee as soon as you take of their diaper. However, we train them to soil themselves and go in their diapers.


Then two years later we pull the rug out from under them and tell them to reverse everything they have been taught and now to not go in their diaper. Understandably, they have a hard time with that. Why deal with that business when they are two and are on principle super a-holes? At 2 they are all about asserting themselves and the word NO. So instead of dealing with that shiz then, you just kind of work on in from the beginning (or whenever you get around to starting it).


We started about two weeks ago with Judah. We put him on his tiny pot at times when he is most likely to need to go, like after a nap or nursing. Eventually we should start picking up on his cues that he needs to go (hence the communication aspect). Sometimes he starts getting fussy and we know he is not hungry or sleepy so on the pot he goes. And it works (not always). He goes pee. It is pretty neat.


We don't do it all the time. He still wears a diaper quite a bit. We are doing EC part time (as opposed to full time or occasional). We are going through less diapers and it is really is less work to dump his pee in the toilet and swipe the pot with a disinfecting wipe than it is to go through the whole diaper change and wipe thing. Plus, it is pretty novel to watch a baby pee on command (we make a Psssst noise to cue him to go).

2 comments:

  1. If only we'd known about this when you and your brother were infants! Good luck with this.

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  2. So cool that you're doing this!

    And your fur babies are *almost* as adorable as your Judah baby.

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