EC (Elimination Communication) and our first child

I was recently reading through some articles on parenting and came upon an article about EC or Elimination Communication/Infant Potty Training. It never occurred to me to even try anything other than diapers with a child as young as three months. I guess the diaper industry and media ingrains so much more in you than you are really aware of.

It was odd reading through articles about it, I was a bit dumb-founded at the idea at first and then I started thinking, "what is this, like new-age hippy stuff?" I kept reading and started to be convinced that I needed to try this since I too had witnessed the times when my son exhibited signs of needing to eliminate to which I normally ignored. So I told Tomoko about the idea that night and she gave me the go ahead to try it.

Next morning after Leon's feeding I looked for some fuss from my son and immediately asked him if he needed to pee pee, he didn't really confirm or anything but he did calm himself for a second. I took him to the bathroom where I removed his diaper and held him over the bathroom sink to try to eliminate, he was able to watch his-self in the mirror and easily passed the urine. I felt like this seemed cool, but is he really just following my lead or does he understand what is going on? I am a pretty firm believer that babies understand a great deal more than we give them credit for and I decided on the latter.

From here I tried to come up with a hand sign to indicate pee pee and decided on two fingers held up straight with the index slightly in front of the middle. To my amazement, within the day he started responding by "attacking" my hand (as if to eat it, like a breast) whenever he meant to confirm that he needed to eliminate. We only went through three diapers that day.

The following week things just got better and better. My only concern was, "what will people think? We are already drug-free home-birthing, exclusively-breastfeeding, un-circumcising, un-vaccinating, co-sleeping, cloth-diapering, cloth-wiping, demand-feeding, baby-wearing, and various other thing-ing parents, which seems to be surprising to most. Why get more controversial with infant potty training? Again, I went with my gut and said, "who cares what people think, I think this is right for us."

The thing that I realized quite quickly was that it wasn't so much about how fast you can potty train your child, it is about whether you can effectively communicate with him about his needs. If he "misses" (goes in the diaper) then he misses and there is no big issue surrounding it. No pressure really, you just want to open that door for communication early and tell him that his needs are understood. As an added benefit, he gets to sit in unsoiled linen and be fully out of diapers by the early age of 10-14 months on average without ever getting used to the feeling of wet britches.

My only qualms with EC is that in research prevalence seemed to revolve around removing diapers from the picture altogether. It isn't that I don't think that going diaper-free from the get-go is great, but I do believe that it isn't for everyone. We decided to keep the cloth diapers on him and just remove them whenever it was time for elimination. In the beginning I did just carry him around with only a thin cloth pre-fold between is bum and my hand, this was just to get the hang of when he needs to go and understand him a little better. It worked very well to get to know the little guy's signals.

We have been doing it for about 7 weeks now, we EC everywhere. If he starts to squirm I just ask him and give him the hand signal and if he confirms, we go to the bathroom and I hold him over the toilet in the stall. He goes, I wipe him up, and put him back together. Pretty easy, the only issue in the beginning is the size of your baby's bladder from what I can tell.

We're gonna stick with it until he is pottying on his own!