In Which Baby Eliminates (part 2)
Originally published at The Vintage Wife. You can comment here or there.
I thought it would be good to make another post about the progress we having been making practicing elimination communication. Here is the first post I made, in case you want to read more about this.
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I am not going to lie, when I first read about E.C. I was a bit intimated. Before I even purchased the Diaper Free Baby I did a ton of research about it online. It sounded easy enough, but if it were so simple why weren’t more people practicing it?
While I was pregnant I mentioned it to several people, almost all who discouraged me from trying. One argument, from a family member who works as a childcare provider, was that older children (2-3 years) have a hard time going to the bathroom in the toilet, so if your baby will eliminate in the toilet on cue it must be luck. I thought this was a bit of a silly argument. The way I saw it (after reading more about EC) was that years of diaper wearing has conditioned the child to ignore their bodily functions, thus making it difficult for many children to toilet train. I decided after that to not talk about it until Lucy was born and we had practiced it ourselves.
Let me just say-it is EASY. We are not even six weeks into this and already we see how happy it makes Lucy not to soil her diaper every time she needs to eliminate. We started the whole process by just holding her over a small baby bjorn toilet every time we went to change her diaper. The first week I would get her to urinate in the toilet maybe once a day or once every two days. At first I thought I was just getting lucky, but over the weeks we noticed real progress being made. Since then it has increased so much that we catch nearly all her pees in it. (BTW, the baby toilet is not necessary, many parents just hold their baby over a toilet or a large bowl)
In recent weeks I have stepped up my game a bit. I am trying to be a bit smarter about it, and look for signs she gives me that she needs to go potty. For example, I know that she always goes pee as soon as she wakes from a nap, so as soon as she wakes I take off her diaper, hold her over the toilet until she does her business, then put her still clean diaper back on.
We still have a bit of work to do catching her poos. She only goes on cue for me every three days or so, though for whatever reason Russ can get her to poo in the potty a bit easier than I can. I am sure this too will come in time.
In case you are interested in reading more, this is the first thing I read about elimination communication that got me wanting to learn more.