I was working on my EC update when I realized something. It’s hard to write a post convincing everyone about how great potty training your baby is when I’ve failed to read my baby’s signals right every time she had to go for the entire day (except for once in the morning). At least, it’s hard to write about it in any sort of an authentic way.  Actually, EC was going really well, and if I recover from this bad day, I may even work up the gumption to pedantically tell all of you how you, too, can be as cool as I am. (After all, I have a nearly finished draft.)

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 am heading into the home stretch on this pregnancy. I only have about three and a half more weeks until my due date. The birth supplies are all laid out and covered with a sheet. The baby clothes (some in pink, some in blue since we like to be surprised about the sex of our new little blessings) are washed, and folded, and waiting in their drawer. We even bought the garlic yesterday for my postpartum herbal baths. The only thing that isn’t ready is the diapers.

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?