Our Pottying Journey

Before Zora was born, Alex and I had many discussions regarding how we wanted to diaper our baby. We wanted to use cloth diapers, but knew we wouldn't have been able to do them on our own, due to the washing machine in our rental house (didn't do hot loads and only had one load size setting). That left us with using a diaper service. I figured we'd contact them once the baby was born, though that didn't work out as smoothly as intended (I left a message, they forgot about it, I thought they were just busy, and yada yada yada,  Z was 2 months old before we got the cloth diapers). As a side story, we were actually about to head out to buy a pack of disposable diapers (for the first few days) the afternoon when my water broke--we never made it to the store.

3 months old

Long before Zora's zeroth birthday, Alex read the Diaper Free book by Ingrid Bauer--and was sold. He was totally gung-ho about doing Elimination Communication (EC), but I was rather skeptical. I kept telling him that we would be too busy or tired to do it. The idea of having a baby out of a diaper sounded messy and hectic to me. Keeping a baby's waste strapped to her body was all I had ever known. I agreed to give it a try, but I figured that once the baby arrived, Alex would quickly realize how impracticable this venture would be. Enter the newborn, who pees every 20 minutes, and poops almost as often. Suddenly, it seemed more practical to leave the diaper off and try to catch what we could. We still went through diapers, but spent a lot less time wiping the baby down, and her diaper rash went away quickly. 

6 months, and mobile!

By the time Zora was 4 months old, the ECing was going swimmingly. She liked sitting on the potty, I was able to read her cues quite easily (Alex never really got that down, but it quickly became an obsolete skill to have), and I was getting lots of inspiration and encouragement from the local EC community. Being a part of this community, I was prepared for Zora's pottying to be affected by her increasing mobility--though I had no idea how fast mobility would come. Rolling over before 4 months, sitting up by 5 months, crawling by 6 months, pulling up to standing by 6.5 months, and walking at 9.5 months--whew! All this development not only wreaked havoc on sleep, but ECing pretty much flew out the window once she was walking. In the EC world, this is called a "potty pause". Zora no longer had patience to sit, and she was so all-over-the-place that I couldn't read any cues anymore--if they were even present. 

8 months old and still tolerating the potty

We had another brief period of success after Zora turned 1--when she started using the sign for potty. The sign we used was the sign for the letter "T" and then you shake your hand. Zora did the sign with her hand open, which made it look like she was waving. There were many instances when she would do the sign out in public and people would say "Well, hello to you too!" and wave back to her. Sometimes I would explain that she needed to make a trip to the loo, and other times I would say nothing. It was pretty funny. So for a while she would sign when she needed to go, or when she was going or had just gone. In the EC world, this is all good, since she had down the critical "communication" part. The definition of this sign eventually branched out to also mean "hey look--a potty!" or "I want to read a book [on the potty]".

17 months, sitting on her "reading seat"

After our brief upturn, Zora started resisting the potty more and more. We never pushed her or made a big deal out of it, but when we offered the potty, she would systematically decline. This started to become frustrating for me (the primary EC-er), so for a couple months, we continued to EC (offered her the potty, talked to her about it when she went, etc.), but still had her in diapers almost full time. This did not work very well though,  so I decided to take the plunge and have her out of diapers full time at home, and just stay on top of the misses. This was tiring (and somewhat frustrating) for a while, but suddenly she started to take charge of her pottying, and sit herself down when she needed to go! This was the first time she was taking such an initiative, and it was very exciting for us. The poops were squared away quite quickly (she has always been a good potty-pooper). The pees took a while longer, but at one point she was peeing more in the potty than on the floor, and then eventually, almost exclusively on the potty--when she was with me (not Alex) and she was a nekkie-butt. 


And our journey continues. Our current situation is that Zora is 26 months old, goes almost exclusively on her little potty (doesn't want anything to do with the big potty), whether she has underwear or is nekkie-butt, wakes up 95% of the time dry, and hasn't peed in her diaper out of the house for several weeks. Our newest endeavor is to take outings with her little potty and Zora in underwear. So far so good, though I know there will be misses along the way. If you had asked me when Zora was 4 months old, at what age she would be out of diapers, I would have said around 12 months. It really seemed that this was where we were headed. Was I disappointed that this was not the case? Well, sometimes--especially when I was washing a load of diapers or hanging them to dry. I do in no way regret having ECed though, since we were able to get to this point with no potty drama, no potty hang-ups, no bribing or cajoling, and we were able to stay connected to Zora throughout the process.

I'm always happy to talk to people about ECing, and if you are considering it, I highly recommend setting up a support network of other parents who are doing the same (I belong to an ECing yahoo listserve). It is easy to want to throw in the towel when you encounter your first "potty pause", so it's really wonderful being able to hear others' experiences and ideas for challenges such as dealing with discouragement from family or friends, part-time ECing, ECing twins, potty pauses, pottying accessories (yes, they exist!), and so on.  Like all things parenting, there is no one way to EC, and just as every baby is different, every EC journey is too.