I'm a Big Kid Now!!!

When I was pregnant, Josh and I went to a friend's house for dinner. After dinner our friend took their 8 month old son to the toilet, made a noise and the baby pooped in the toilet. I was amazed!! They said that it was much cleaner and that their sister-in-law had taught them how to do it. I made a mental note about how great it would be to not have to clean poopy diapers, especially when the baby is eating solid foods.

After Maddy was born I heard about the idea of 'elimination communication' through a parenting group. Many people dismissed the idea because they said that it was more about training the parents than it was about potty training the baby. Recently, Sandra told us that they were going to try it with their 3 month old daughter. After hearing about her success and how it wasn't too hard, I decided to get a book and give it a try. The book was really interesting and it made some points that really made sense to me. It talked about how babies, like all mammals, are born with the instinct to not soil themselves, but we train them to poop and pee in the diaper. They soon learn that (in the diaper) is where you are supposed to go. They also forget how it feels to hold and relax the muscles down south at the appropriate times, and that is what potty training is all about. So the idea with EC is to not let the baby forget what it feels like the do their business without a diaper on.

We started with Maddy about a month and a half ago when she started solids. My goal was only to catch the poops. All we did was to give her some 'diaper free' time and watch her. (Since we use cloth diapers, we were already doing this each day because the cloth diapers do not keep her skin as dry as a diaposable.) If during this time, she peed or pooped we would say a cue word so that she'd learn to associate the sensation of going with the cue word. When we thought she had made the association we started to put her on the potty each time we changed her diaper. After that she just did it. The more she pooped on the potty, the more she started to prefer it. I now think that she waits until she is on the potty to do the #2! :) We are at the point now where she has more poop hits than misses and she even get a few pees in there too. For me, I'm really happy to not clean poopy butts and cloth diapers AND I just think she looks so darn cute on sitting on the potty!


Here she is today. We had pictures from before, but she's just learned how to sit on her own for short periods of time so we don't have to hold on the potty anymore. Monkey, Froggy or Bunny usually keep her company.