Okay, I'm officially a hippie now.

Adam's been telling me that for years, but now I have no choice but to agree on this one.

Shoot, I swore I'd never be one of those parents-- you know, the ones that blather on about their kid's potty habits and make you inwardly scream, "TMI! TMI!!!" But even hippies have to potty-train their kids. And you have to admit, a potty training one-month-old is a bit out of the ordinary. But I apologize for the TMI-ness, anyways.

So, I've been wildly interested in trying Elimination Communication, the art learning to recognize a baby's cues that it needs to eliminate, and respond by helping him use a receptacle other than a diaper. Babies, for the most part, are born with a dislike of sitting in their own waste. Hence why my little guy likes to spray every other time I take his diaper off (lucky me!). EC appeals to me because I don't see the logic in getting a baby used to ignoring that inborn dislike, and then trying to undo the damage later during the terrible two's or three's. Not to mention the decreased diapers! I'm all for that!

So Sunday night, I was like, "What the heck, let's give it a whirl!" and I put him in cloth diapers without covers so I'd know exactly when he went. From this, I was going to put together a rough idea of his elimination patterns. Supposedly, most babies have times that they'll predictably go: upon waking; 5, 10, 15 minutes into a feeding, etc. For other times, they will give cues: grunting, wiggling, staring off into space... It's all about learning your baby's individual cues and patterns.

Well, about 29854 wet diapers into it, I looked at the clock. It had only been a few hours! I'd had enough of pattern watching, and decided to try the real deal, since he had been dry for a little while. I held him over the bathroom sink, started making sssss pssss sounds.... and then he went!


This happened a few more times. I was absolutely floored by how little encouragement it took for him to do his business (although now that I think of it, is there ANY baby that needs encouragement to be a little poop machine?). I'm still working on learning his cues and figuring out a pattern, which is a little complicated since we've been going out quite a bit lately, and of course I need to put him back in diapers for that. Oy veh. But, of course, this is a skill that takes time to learn!

Today, I took a giant leap of faith and let him go diaperless. He's just lying on my lap with a prefold under his little baby butt, and so far, I haven't been a target, lol! Actually, while I was writing this, Baby D finished a feeding and started grunting. I've observed that he tends to have a bowel movement around feeding times, so I rushed him to the bathroom, and... sure enough, he had to go! Yay for us!!!

In short, this has been an activity that yields amazing results for so little time and effort invested so far. I'm hoping he's not lulling me into a false sense of security before he does something outrageous, the little stinker. I'll keep you posted on how it goes!

Here are some links about EC, in case you're interested:

http://www.diaperfreebaby.org
http://www.tribalbaby.org
EC YouTube video