I am once again attempting to write about our Adventures in
Elimination Communication . . .
I had heard of EC when I was pregnant with Jamey, but couldn’t
quite wrap my head around it—I wasn’t sure how to go about it—I was a brand new
parent with a million other worries/distractions. It didn’t work for me . . . but it WOULD HAVE
worked for Jamey—he HATED to be wet even as a brand newborn and would
definitely have responded well to early EC.
After learning even more about it, and seeing how Jamey went from hating
his diaper being wet and loving to be changed to not caring at all and hating
being changed.
For those who aren’t familiar, Elimination Communication is
a term for less diaper-centered and more communication-centered approach to dealing
with the inevitable pees and poos of infanthood. In our culture where most people use diapers
for 2-3 years, people often aren’t aware that even a very young infant: -has
the ability to control their bowel/bladder, -prefers not to soil themselves if
they don’t have to. What this means is
that EC describes a system in which the baby either does not wear a diaper or
the parent is changing the wet diaper immediately, and the parent is cueing the
baby to pee or poop over a toilet or potty, potentially from birth or a few
months old.
Ideally, what happens here is that the baby remains aware of
and in control of their bladders/bowels, and instead of getting attached to a
diaper as the “right” place to go to the bathroom, they learn from the
beginning that they can use the potty instead.
Some Moms describe babies, ECed
from birth, who when they learned to crawl started crawling to their potty when
they had to pee. So potentially a baby
who is EC’d from birth could be totally “potty-trained” by the time they start
walking—12-18 months.
So with that intro, back to us . . .
Anyway, I never really did it much with Jamey—I would experiment for a week or two, leaving him laying on cloth diapers or loosely wrapped around him, and changing him often and trying to cue him—but like I said, I was a little too distracted mastering breast-feeding, baby-proofing, and adjusting to first time motherhood, so I never quite had the dedication to stick with it seriously for any period of time.
But then I got pregnant.
And nauseous, and tired . . . and the diaper changes that used to take
all my energy/stamina/patience were now screaming/wrestling matches between
Jamey and I. He would throw a fit like
I was TORTURING HIM every time I changed his diaper. I resorted to yelling, pinching his legs,
pinning him down . . . it’s not a choice when there is poop in his butt!
So when I hit the second trimester, started vomited with
more predictability and less horsepower . . . and stopped being so tired that
my body felt incased in concrete . . . I thought, "Well, let’s take the 2nd
trimester and see if an EC/diaper free approach would actually work if I stuck
with it. And if I can get the boy
potty-trained before I have another baby. . . awesome."
So we took off the diapers and I got over pee and poo. I learned that baby pee doesn’t smell too
bad . . . that baby poop barely gets his butt dirty when he’s pooping on the
floor instead of a diaper. I learned
that it’s easier to wipe up a puddle of pee off the ground than change a
diaper. I learned that poop doesn’t even
get the rug dirty unless he/someone steps on it before I can grab it. And I learned that he instinctively DOESN’T
step in pee or poo when he knows it’s somewhere, so that has rarely happened .
. . and within a week I saw more control—he started to pee and poo in certain
places at certain times, and NOT go in other situations. For instance in 5 weeks of being completely
diaper free, he has never peed or pood ON me or James or anyone else—never while
anyone was holding him, or he was sitting in their lap or playing close
together. He has never peed on his books
or toys. Meanwhile he has peed standing
at the screen door like 10 times.
And, throughout all this, though, my kid would not sit on
the potty. Or the toilet—he would not
try to pee, he would not pee on cue, and for a while he would even STOP peeing
when I managed to get the potty bowl in between his urine stream and the
ground. But I persisted.
And finally,after a month of peeing and pooing with abandon,
Jamey finally decided to pee on a bush one day when I suggested it. Since then (maybe for a week or a bit
longer), I've been taking him outside to pee on the bush regularly, reducing
our "accidents"—pees on the floor—to 1-2 a day. Finally a couple days ago he actually sat on
his little potty and peed on request, and since then has been doing it more and
more.
So at this point he has total control over peeing—just like
that, once he got the “trick” of trying, he can do it nearly every time . . .
except that he still forgets to hold it, so if I don't take him often enough,
he will eventually have an accident. He
also doesn't usually tell me when he has to go, though he has, on his own, peed
and pood in the potty increasingly over the last few days/weeks.
The actual toilet is still too distracting--focus and
motivation seem to be key for him. It
works well (as long as he's not too hungry/tired) to say: "Please go
pee-pee and then we can do X fun thing!"
But he is really into cars/vehicles right now so when he's outside
trying to pee on the bush, if an interesting truck or something drives by he
might totally "lose it".
Anyway, I think I might start trying to get him to go on the
toilet more often, using the flush (and maybe a sticker/sticker chart) as
motivation. I think if I can get him
attached to either flushing/handwashing or the stickers, and he realizes he
just needs to pee in the toilet first to get these things, that might be the proper
motivation to do it (until he gets bored with those things after a few weeks).
I’m actually really pleased with how things are progressing—it
is so gratifying to see that he has learned to “try”—and I really feel like a
lot of the work left is just building skills and honing his habits so that he
wants/expects/automatically goes to, try the potty at certain times every
day. Honestly a lot of this is honing
OUR skills—remembering to take him every hour or so, and esp after meals and
stuff . . .
It’s funny though, I started out this diaper-free thing
thinking if it didn’t “work”, ie, result in “potty-training”, by the time I got
too huge to deal with it, I would “give up”, ie “go back to diapers”. But at
this point I really do buy into the idea that it’s just an easier, more
straightforward way to deal with pee and poop.
Like, I’m to the point now that I don’t think I would go back to using
diapers even if he just kept going to the bathroom on my floor. But I also see it working—I see that there is
real progress—he learns, he grows. So
now the idea of using diapers seems like backpedaling, and ironically, extra work!
Anyway, I’m very glad to report progress—hopefully I will
report more soon! ;-)
2 comments:
Wow! I knew bits and pieces about your process but it's good to read the whole story. It's awesome that he is learning to use the potty/hold it!!! I hope he's all trained up by the time #2 comes along...(no that was not a poo pun..lol)
Are you thinking of doing EC with the new baby? I don't really get how it would work for a newborn though. How can you really communicate something like that to a little?
Great job!
Yeah I think we are going to try it with the new one from the beginning. I guess the cue noise works really well for little ones--it's like almost unconscious . . . but WE'LL SEE. Every baby is different.
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