Update on Elimination Communication

Over a year ago, I started reading about Diaper Free Baby and elimination communication.  I was sold on the idea that if I just put some effort into it that Lily would be effectively using the potty with few accidents by a year old.  Eighteen months max.  Psssh.  Potty train my infant.  NO PROBLEM.  Hahahahahahahaha.

Lily had other ideas.

Let me tell you.  Lily. HATES. The potty.  Hates it.  She has hated it since she was a newborn.  I mean, come on.  Newborns don't know what is going on.  They are supposed to pee and poop anywhere and everywhere if left uncontained.  Hahahahahaha. Not this girl.

baby hand sign for potty

We start out with cuing her with a sound (grrr) and hand sign when we can tell she's eliminating.  Pooping, peeing, whatever.  When we pick up on her cues, I get her positioned over a potty.  The first day we try it out again, she's pretty chill about it.  Every day after that, she freaks the *bleep* out.  Freaks out.  Like I took away her favorite toy.  Or like I ran over her dog in the driveway.  This girl freaks out.  And then, she stops communicating that she has to go to the bathroom.  She stonewalls us.  I still cannot tell you to this day when she's going to pee.  And, if I pick up that she's going to poop and move her to any potty, she refuses to go to the bathroom.  I've used a ziplock container in between my legs, a baby bjorn portable potty, and the toilet.  Hold her like this.  Hold her like that. None of it matters.  But, you bet you if she's in a wet diaper that it's meltdown city.

So, we've gone through three rounds of cuing, picking up on her cues, putting her on the potty, meltdown city, and then she stop cuing, so we take a break for a few weeks.  In this last case, it's been a couple of months.   I thought that maybe when it got warmer, I'd put her out on a towel and observe her pee cues.  But that just seems like so much work.  Too messy.  I don't know what my other options are.  Lately, she's been giving us poop cues.  I thought that maybe when she could hold herself up without our assistance on the baby bjorn potty that I might try again then.

Over the weekend, she started picking up on the baby sign language, so I started giving her the poop cue again with a grrrr and potty hand sign.  That makes her smile a lot.  Maybe this positive association to the hand sign will help ease her into it.

Diaper Free Baby?

In looking into green and organic diaper options, I still haven't made a decision on what kind of diapers to use.  There are a lot of reusable choices, and I'll talk about diapers later.  What I've been reading about this week has been a diaper free baby.  One of my girl friends sent a link to Alicia Silverstone's review of the book Diaper Free Baby.  This book talks about the possibility of toilet training from birth, and the process of understanding when your baby has to use the bathroom is called "elimination communication" as opposed to conventional toilet training during toddler years.
 
I'm just gonna get off my chest that I found the subculture of "ECers" a little creepy.   I rolled my eyes when the book talked about EC support groups and how this one woman was so relieved to meet other people practicing EC so that she didn't have to be in the closet with it all of the time.  Instead of coming out of the broom closet, maybe she was coming out of the potty closet.  I know, I'm horrible.  That woman was just excited to be able to share her experiences with other people.  For that, I am very happy for her, because moms need that.  I can't lie; I might check out the local group to see if the extra support is helpful.

That said, there is a lot of value to the basic principles of having a diaper free baby.  It starts with the premise that babies aren't born with the desire to poo in their pants, and that we teach them to do that.  They want to soil themselves as much as adults do.  Parents can help babies adapt to using the toilet starting at any time, including just after birth, through a few combination mechanisms:

• Watching for signals the baby is giving off just before peeing or pooping.
• Communicating that it's time to go to the bathroom by giving cues (making a sound), such as "pssssssst" for peeing or grunting for pooping.
• Holding the baby in a comfortable position over the toilet, infant potty, diaper, or other container.
• Not letting the baby sit long in a soiled diaper.
• Not using super-absorbent diapers.
• Using clothing that allows for easy removal.

The author of Diaper Free Baby emphasizes that practicing this technique isn't required all of the time.  Babies can be outfitted with cloth or disposable diapers when out and about or at night.  Doing this for a few hours per day can have drastic results.  Even just paying attention to baby's signals once a week for a couple of hours can have a good impact on the lessening the length of time to potty training a child. 

I find this concept fascinating, because I completely believe that babies can learn to use the toilet at a much earlier age.  It also folds right into the concept that we can communicate with Baby Bennett prior to speech development by using hand signs.  Baby daddy and I purchased a baby sign language kit, because babies do have the ability to communicate and once we establish communication, we can better help baby be happy.  And, we can help develop our child's cognitive skills earlier.