How do you and your baby communicate with each other?

My baby communicates with me by fussing and squirming, and I communicate with her using the phrase, “Would you like to go potty?” Most people who do EC use some kind of little noise, like “psh psh,” but that just didn’t fit my personality. I’m a word person. I wanted to use something real. I did realize, however, that it would be a long time before my baby was parsing the individual words in the sentence, so I’ve been careful to use the same tone and inflection every time. She had clearly learned that this was her cue by the time she was only a few weeks old. So far, she has been willing to go potty in a great many different places just based on having her diaper off and hearing me say this phrase. (I do have to be careful that the location isn’t too interesting, though, or she’ll just look around and forget to relax and go.)

I learned the hard way not to give her the cue until I had everything completely ready. When she was a couple of weeks old, we were heading into the bathroom to go potty and found it occupied by my three-year-old son. He was just finishing up, and I started taking off the baby’s diaper so we’d be all set when our turn came. Absently as I pulled it off, I said, “Would you like to go potty?” meaning it literally that time, and not as the cue. But my little girl immediately let fly–right on her brother’s head.

Is there a reliable timing of when your baby needs to go potty, and how did you figure it out?

The timing is fairly reliable. I started with my EC-ing friend’s advice that I should take my baby immediately when she woke up. And when she was a newborn, she slept so much that this was very nearly the only timing I needed to know. As she has grown and spent more time awake, I have simply observed the times that she had wet diapers and watched for a pattern. The times I’ve found she often needs to go are upon waking, immediately after eating, and right before a position change. (These are quite similar to the times when older children and even adults need to use the bathroom as well.)

Do you experience times when you catch the right moment, not through signs and timing, but simply through intuition?

This terrified me before I started. I kept reading stuff that made EC sound mystical, like you “just know” when your baby has to go. People would even talk about hearing words in their heads. That pretty much killed the whole idea of EC for me right there. I thought, “there’s no way. I will never, ever ‘just know.’” But it turns out, you don’t have to. Maybe, maybe once or twice I’ve caught a potty need on intuition alone, but it could just be that I realized it had been awhile since my baby’s last trip to the bathroom. For me, it hasn’t been any more mystical than any other area of baby care like figuring out that my baby is hungry and needs to nurse. Simple, straightforward pattern recognition, cues and timing, nothing magic.

Are your husband, your children and your close friends also involved in your baby’s potty training?

My husband is my cheering section and the head of my PR department. Nothing could be more motivating than hearing him tell people about how our baby goes potty in the bathroom. And at the beginning, when I was still getting used to my baby’s signals, my children were good helpers in listening for that special grunty fuss. Friends have been a big support, too, and if it weren’t for my friend who actually let me see her baby going potty, I don’t know if I would have ever even tried EC. But as far as actually taking my baby to the bathroom, except for a handful of times she’s gone for her Daddy, I’m the one who gets the joy of doing it. My baby actually gets pretty distracted when there are other people watching her, and the one time a friend tried to take her, my baby didn’t go.

Does EC support good health?

The main health benefit of EC that I have seen has been that my baby has virtually no diaper rash. My first three children were going through tube after tube of Desitin, but now that I’m doing EC, my baby’s skin is dry nearly all the time, and we’ve gone nearly nine months on a partially used tube of Desitin left over from my third baby’s diaper rash days.

Do you believe that EC is having a positive influence on the development of your child?

Well, I think it might be. This baby is certainly much happier than my first three and more communicative. There’s no way of knowing for sure, but it seems like it would make sense that being more comfortable and having more chances to meaningfully express herself would make a little person happier and more willing to reach out. In fact, my baby learned her first word at eight and a half months old. She very clearly says “Mama” when she wants me to nurse her. It’s possible that she got some heavy-duty linguistic gene and would have been talking early without EC, but success breeds success, and I can’t help but wonder if having me treat all her little babbles as meaningful gave her a jump start.

Is your decision to practice EC in coherence with your Christian convictions and lifestyle?

I certainly don’t think that all Christian mothers must practice EC. The Bible never says a thing about it, so in a very large sense, it is just a personal preference. But in that I am a Christian and my faith permeates every aspect of my life and thinking, there is a sense in which my practice of EC is touched by my Christianity, particularly my Lord’s command to treat others the way I would like to be treated.

Therefore all things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them: for this is the law and the prophets. –Matthew 7:12

If I were unable to walk myself to the bathroom, I know I would much rather have someone take me than put me in a diaper and change me at their convenience (like I did with my first three children). That’s a big thing that keeps me going on this strange path. I’m treating my baby the way I would like to be treated myself.

A few weeks ago, a sweet young woman in Switzerland, who has dropped by my blog from time to time, contacted me and asked if she could interview me for a paper she was writing as part of her medical assistant program. (After e-mailing back and forth a few times, we discovered that she actually goes to the same church as our very dear friends in Switzerland–small world!) I was glad to answer her questions, and she graciously agreed to let me post the interview on my blog. I have divided it into parts, and her questions are in italics.

What was your motivation to start EC?

My original motivation for starting EC was that I hoped it would make potty training easier. As a mother of three, going on four small children, I was deep in the throes of potty training trauma, facing the laundry, the carpet cleaning, the wet footprints leading away from puddles, and worst of all, the awful frustration of having a toddler oblivious to messy pants. Proponents of EC claim that babies are born with the same aversion that older humans have to soiling themselves. It’s just that we train it out of them by forcing them to sit in their own waste for two years or so while they’re wearing diapers. Then one day, we decide it’s time for them to hate going in their pants and prefer going to the potty. But why should they? We just spent the last two years teaching them not to care.

After struggling through potty training two older children the traditional way and facing an upcoming third round with my toddler who was still in diapers, I was very interested in seeing if I could improve things the next time around by avoiding making my baby get used to going in her diaper.

But now, after nearly nine months of EC, I have a different motivation (though I’m still very curious to see how potty training goes). When I started EC, I was focused on the “E,” but now my focus is more on the “C.” The feeling of needing to go potty makes my baby uncomfortable, and I can help her feel better. It’s another need I can meet, another call I can answer. She talks, in grunty little baby words. And I understand, just like when she needs warmth, or food, or cuddles. I can’t imagine not doing it.

How is it possible to practice EC along with your busy daily routine?

Before I started, I was really concerned about the time investment. But usually, it only takes a minute to take her to the bathroom and let her go, and it slips easily into my day like nursing and changing diapers. If she finishes nursing, or wakes up from a nap, or is about to change positions (from baby sling to playing on the floor, for example), I take her to the bathroom to see if she needs to go. I don’t really notice the time loss any more than I notice the time loss from helping my older children in the bathroom.

Has the fact that you started EC changed much in your habits of caring for babies, for example, how you dress them?

My baby clothes preferences have changed a bit. I try to keep my baby in clothes that allow quick access in the bathroom and that also allow me to check easily to see if my baby has already gone in her diaper and needs a change rather than a trip to the potty. In the summer, dresses were ideal, but now that it’s cold, I mostly use sleepers with snaps on both legs that can be quickly opened on the way to the bathroom. And most important are old fashioned cloth diapers (not the super-absorbent modern varieties). The baby needs to connect the feeling of wetness with going in her diaper.

But the bigger change has been in how I respond to my baby. When my older children napped, I would usually wait until they cried before I went in and picked them up. Now that I’m paying attention to pottying, I’ve learned that my baby wakes up and lies quietly for a minute or two, goes potty in her diaper, and then cries. So, whenever I can, I try to get her before she cries. This is harder to catch, of course, but if I see her little eyes open, I scoop her up and take her to the bathroom.

I also try to pay better attention to fussing. My baby will fuss and squirm just a bit before she goes. If I don’t notice that, eventually she will go in her diaper, and then she will really cry. With my older children, when I heard the early fussing, I would often just give them a little bounce in my arms as if they were bored and needed a distraction. Now, I’m trying to take my baby to the bathroom. Old habits die hard, though. And I frequently will discover that she’s wet, and then look back and see I had tried to bounce her without even thinking.

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To be continued…

My six week old baby goes potty in the toilet. This is even more amazing to me than the cat I heard about once who used the toilet. It’s called EC, or elimination communication, a fancy term for taking babies to the bathroom from birth (or babyhood) instead of training them to use diapers for two years or so, and then trying to potty train them. In our culture we are so used to thinking that babies have no control, no awareness of their elimination. But ever since the day my friend let me watch her one month old going potty, I’ve been wondering if we’d made a mistake in those cultural assumptions. Maybe babies really are aware of going potty. I was super curious. So I bought the book (Infant Potty Training by Laurie Boucke). I did my research. I washed my cloth diapers. I was psyched to begin.

My labor was long and emotionally draining, and afterwards I was so tired. But I was still committed to trying EC, so I kept dutifully taking my baby to the bathroom, hoping she’d go in the toilet. Nothing.

Then my milk came in, and on day four of my little girl’s life, she went potty in the toilet three times. I was thrilled. Ever since that day, I’ve been an excited EC convert. Some days are better than others. On the worst days, we only get one potty in the toilet. On the best days, she only goes in her diaper a few times. The record was three. It would have been two, except that I was busy boasting on Facebook about how she’d only used two diapers that day and I missed her signals. “Pride goeth before…” and all. On average, I think I’m getting her to the bathroom for about half of her potties, so we have not yet made the glorious leap to “diaper free” (although I’m really dreaming about it).

Intrigued? For anyone out there who would like to try it (or if you just want to read the details of this bizarre thing I’m doing, so you can shake an educated head at me), here’s my not very expert, still newbie, advice on the subject. (If you want the expert version, you’ll probably want to read the book.)

How to Get Started With EC

Almost everyone (baby or not) has to go when they first wake up. All this time I thought my babies were soaking their diapers in their sleep. Now that I’m paying attention, I’ve found (and my reading has confirmed) that babies usually don’t go in their sleep. They go right after they wake up (and they actually wake up in the middle of the night to go potty). But here’s the catch. They often don’t wait very long. As soon as they start to squirm and wiggle, take them to the bathroom. They’ll probably go within a minute or two unless they are fixated on filling their bellies first. Sometimes babies are just too hungry when they first wake up to think about pottying, and some need to be sucking on something in order to go. At first, I would nurse my baby over the toilet until she went (usually in under two minutes), and then I would move to a more comfortable spot. Once she got the hang of things, though, if she was ravenous, I would just nurse her on the first side, and she could usually hold it. We’d go to the bathroom, and then nurse on the other side.

Classic EC starts with an “observation phase,” and you’ll definitely want to do this because there may be other times that your baby goes potty besides when first waking up. The usual way to do this part is to leave your baby out of a diaper so you are sure of when they’re going. I found that I could just keep feeling my baby’s cloth diaper. What you want to pay attention to is pottyings in relation to naps and nursings. In general, a pretty clear pattern will show itself that’s different for every baby. Once you know when your baby is going, you also just might start to see those mysterious signs everyone’s always talking about. I discovered that (surprise!) my baby fusses before she goes. It’s a special, grunty sort of fuss, usually not a full blown cry (that happens if I fail to take her the bathroom and she’s wet, or if she’s trying really hard to hold it). I was pretty shocked about this because I realized that all my children had cried like that, and I had just jiggled them a little in their slings to “calm them down,” and gone on, oblivious, and totally convinced that they didn’t signal their potty needs. I’ll never know for sure, of course, but I can’t help but wonder if they were about to go. Even my five year old has learned to hear that fuss, and will frequently call me to take her baby sister to the bathroom.

When you take your baby to the bathroom, it’s important to use the potty position. Here’s my blogging friend, Meghann, demonstrating with her older baby. And here’s another friend’s sister with her six week old. Notice the position the babies’ legs are in. It’s like they’re squatting. Turns out, according to the book I read, that if a baby has to go, this is the easiest position for him to go in, and you’re fairly guaranteed a reward for your efforts.

In between potty visits, it really helps if you can use cloth diapers. Disposables are just way too absorbent. You’ll have a hard time noticing if your baby has gone, and worse yet, your baby will have a hard time noticing. You want your baby to know right away that relaxing his sphincter muscles when he’s wearing a diaper makes him feel wet and uncomfortable so he has a reason to try to go in the toilet. Once your baby figures out that you’ll take him to a potty place, you may find that he’s actually trying to do his potties in the toilet. My baby sure is! When I hold her over the toilet, I can tell she’s pushing. And if I take her away too soon when she really does have to go, she’ll cry.

The last thing you need to know about EC is how to communicate with your baby about it, how to tell him “here’s the spot, you can go now.” Most people all over the world, make some kind of whispery sound that varies from culture to culture, something like “psh psh.” That didn’t fit my personality, so I say, “Would you like to go potty?” Decide what your signal is going to be, and make it every time you are in a potty place. Or if you notice your baby is going, make it while he’s going. It’s good to get your baby latched on to a signal so you can take him in different places. Some babies get attached to one spot at home, and won’t go anywhere else. Take your baby in lots of places early on. We’ve gone in pubic bathrooms, bathrooms in friends’ houses, out in the woods on family rock climbing adventures (my hubby is quite a climber), and held over (not wearing!) a disposable diaper in the car if she needs to go when we’re on our way somewhere.

I am continually delighted that my baby can do this. I can honestly say that it’s made me much more aware of her personhood. Humans don’t like wetting themselves, and she’s human, so why shouldn’t she be aware of this? It’s a pretty big light bulb coming on in the brain of a girl who’s known nothing but changing diapers all her life. Like my friend’s sister said in her very excellent blog post on the subject,

I feel a bit like I think I would if I had discovered breastfeeding after having fed a baby routinely by intubation every few hours because I didn’t know a baby knew how to suck the milk out of a mother.

Like I said, I’m definitely not an expert yet. (I’m still rather dismal at catching number 2!) But if anyone would like to talk about EC with me, I’d love to share what I’ve learned so far.

But for now, let’s just think for a minute about gimicky parenting schemes and the Mommy Warriors who like to evangelize about them. “Oh, yes, we’re following Dr. Rev. Godly Wiseguy’s parenting book, How to Have Better Kids Than All Your Friends, And Please God, Too. And little Rupert hasn’t once wet his bed, or sassed his Mommy,  or turned up his nose at collard greens since we implemented the Seven Principles. He sleeps through the night, picks up his toys without being asked, and has led twelve neighborhood children in the Sinner’s Prayer. What’s that? You’ve never heard of the book? Here, let me loan you the copy I always keep in my purse…”

It’s really great when you find something that works for your family, really great, lifesaving even, depending on the problem you were trying to solve. And out here, surfing the vast waves of the Internet, it’s easy to run into people who have the answer, who will tell you all the marvelous ways this or that book or method has transformed their lives, their children’s lives, and the lives of their goldfish. But we all need to keep in mind that despite the life changing qualities of many a parenting trick, they will all fail in one area. They will not be able to take away our humanity, fallen and fallible. Even the best parents using the best ideas (and potty training your baby, my friends, is pretty snifty when it works), will still have bad days, days when nothing goes right, days when they fail to implement even three of the Seven Principles. We all have bad days. I, you, and everyone else. And if we’re really committed to the gimmicky scheme of the month, we may feel like bad mothers.

Let’s not forget that we are humans raising humans. Our homes are assailed by sin, hormones, sickness, tiredness, and just plain old human failure. And the real measure of our mothering metal is not how many brilliant principles we manage to implement, but how we care for our children on the days we fail.

I have a library full of lifechanging books, but there’s only one I always keep in my purse, and that’s the Bible. It’s the only parenting scheme that will ever be able to help my frail humanity and that of my children. Here’s a little quote that’s just right for the bad days.

Like as a father pitieth his children, so the LORD pitieth them that fear him.  For he knoweth our frame; he remembereth that we are dust.  As for man, his days are as grass: as a flower of the field, so he flourisheth.  For the wind passeth over it, and it is gone; and the place thereof shall know it no more. But the mercy of the LORD is from everlasting to everlasting upon them that fear him, and his righteousness unto children’s children;  To such as keep his covenant, and to those that remember his commandments to do them. –Psalm 103:13-18

I started out a staunch cloth diaper girl. It’s better for the environment, gentler on the pocketbook, safer on baby’s skin to avoid all those chemicals. Besides, I would rather wear cotton than paper and plastic all the time.

… And then I discovered the struggles, the fact that even with double diapering, we had a leak nearly every night, and then there was the leak nearly every morning after that first great big nursing, not to mention the fact that I never found a good way of getting the wet and messy diapers home in the diaper bag without making everything in the diaper bag smell like a diaper pail. And while we’re on the subject of diaper pails, I never figured out what to do with the diapers that were waiting to be washed without having them stink up the entire room. And speaking of washing, laundry is my downfall. I’m always behind, and using cloth diapers involves washing them, which means adding two or three loads a week to my already overloaded laundry schedule.

Which all explains why, despite my impassioned beginnings, cloth diapering fell by the wayside somewhere after the arrival of baby number two.

Enter EC. For those of you who have never heard of this, it stands for “Elimination Communication,” and it basically means letting your child go potty on the toilet, or in some other receptacle right from birth instead of forcing them to spend the first year or two of their lives sitting in their own urine and feces. I know. I know. At first, it sounds kind of nice, nice and bizarre, nice and impractical, nice and impossible. I heard about it for years myself before I even considered trying it because it depends on knowing when your baby needs to go. And I had no idea when my children needed to go. None. I was used to waiting until they could talk, and then trying to get them to say, “I need to go potty.” But then, you know, potty training a child who has spent his whole life being trained to make messes in his pants can be a harrowing experience. It takes FOREVER to convince him that all of a sudden he should not make messes in his pants, that it is no longer a brilliant plan just to go wherever he happens to be when he feels the urge.

Well, a couple of friends of mine (one from church and one from the blogosphere) tried EC with their babies. My friend from church even let me watch her little one month old in action. She held him in position, and he went, number one and number two. I picked my chin up off the floor, and gave it all some serious thought. I started applying some of the principles to my little one and a half year old, and lo and behold, so often when I thought she had been fussing for “no reason,” it was actually because she had to go, and she didn’t really want to go in her diaper. She used to wake up over and over at night and have an awful time going back to sleep. When I started taking her to the bathroom when she first woke up, she went right back to sleep immediately in perfect comfort. I realized she had been trying to sleep with a full bladder, which is very unsettling, and it kept waking her up.

As a general rule, I am leery of gimmicky parenting, but this one somehow makes sense to me. If I were weak and helpless, I would sure rather someone helped me to the bathroom instead of just sticking a diaper on me and changing it whenever it fit their schedule. And babies are no less human than adults. Could it be that our whole concept of their not having any preferences in this area is a little misguided?

SO, to make a long story short, I’m actually considering trying EC with our new little one, and EC is MUCH easier if you use cloth diapers. Babies dislike being wet, and disposables instantly turn the moisture into a gel which ruins the feedback babies would ordinarily get from wetting themselves. I have found that my toddler has one accident after another when she wears disposable training pants, but panics immediately (often enough to stop until she makes it to the bathroom) if she starts to have an accident in cloth.

The other day, I dug my newborn size diaper covers out of the old baby clothes bin and put them on the floor of the backlogged laundry room to await the next light colors load. I still have to find the rest of my stash of little, unbleached, organic prefolds and find another bucket that’s been emptied of the forty pounds of wheat berries it came to us with to use as a diaper pail. Then I should be all set for the next stage of my diapering adventures. Does anyone have any advice for me?