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My husband and I recently decided to try Elimination Communication.
I bought a book called The Diaper Free Baby. I purchased this book after hearing about it from my husband. He heard something on the radio about it. Then, a church friend started doing it with her little girl. Amazed that a 9 month was using the toilet 80% of the time, I was intrigued.
"As Christine Gross-Loh reveals in her progressive, enlightening book...infants are born with the ability to communicate their need to "go," just as they communicate hunger or sleepiness."
Now, I was thinking just as you are now. A baby with no diaper? That seems pretty messy! But diaper-free doesn't mean diaper-less. It's all about listening to your baby's cues of when they need to go. The book talks about how babies are not born with desire to sit in there own waste. This makes perfect sense to me, because I've always hated the idea of my baby sitting in his dirty diaper. I change him as often as possible.
The U.S. average for potty training is 3 years! I just can't imagine changing diapers for 3 years! This book is not about trying to get your baby potty trained as early as possible. It's a book about being in-tune with your baby and listening to your baby's cues, just as you do with other things...sleeping, eating, etc., but it seems that most parents who practice EC have their babies potty trained at around one years of age. Did you know that 50% of the world's children are "potty trained" by one year's old? I didn't.
I love how the book puts no pressure to do EC full time. If you do it part-time or even occasional and it can be beneficial. This is where I am at with it. For the past week or so, we've been doing it occasional to part-time. I was very skeptical at first, but figured what could be the harm in just trying it out? We mostly catch his bowl movements because they are the easiest. Whenever we see G working on a bowl movement, we hold him over the toilet and he "goes." It's kind of exciting actually. Less messy diapers to clean and diaper rashes are pretty much an non-issue.
I'm also making my own version of these cute babylegs to make this whole process easier. We'll see how it goes. So far, so good.
2 comments:
Hurray for another EC'er! We like doing EC part-time too. I haven't read that book, so it's nice to hear a review of it. Did you get him a little potty or do you hold him over the big one? We're enjoying the babylegs - David wants Geneva to wear them all the time.
We do have Baby Bjorn potty, but he really doesn't like it when we prop him up on it. He does much better when we hold him over the toilet. Maybe when he can sit up on his own the potty will work out better. I'm glad you're enjoying the "babylegs." I hope they hold up okay. They are kind of an experiment I'm working on. David is such a cutie!
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