How to Pee in the Sink

It all started one day when I was sitting in my friend's kitchen having tea.  I was pregnant with my second child.  We chatted and drank tea, and her seven month old sat on her lap and periodically nursed.  Then without explanation, she walked over to the kitchen sink, took off her baby's pants, and held her baby in the sink for a moment, whispering something in her ear.  I thought I heard water running.  As she put her baby's pants back on and returned to the table, I was dumbfounded.  I stared at her for a moment like she had two heads, and blurted out "Did your baby just pee in the sink?"  I still wasn't sure what I had just witnessed, but I knew I had never seen anything like it.

That started the process of learning an entirely new way of diapering- no diapers at all!  In North America, the technique is called Elimination Communication, or simply diaper free.  In some other cultures, it is normal.

The theory is that babies are aware from birth of a pee or poo coming on.  They can communicate that they have to go through body language or vocal signals.  From birth, they have the ability to consciously eliminate.  If we can pick up on their signals, and offer them an appropriate place to go, they can maintain their natural awareness of their body's functions.  If we keep them in diapers, we are teaching them that the diaper is where we want them to go, and later  in life, we have to re-train them to use the potty.  Often, by this point, they have forgotten how to recognize their body's signals in time to make it to the potty, and they have to re-learn this skill.

So, Elimination Communication, or EC, means you don't have to potty train.  It means your baby will not be sitting in pee or poo.  She will not get diaper rashes.  It may reduce fussiness (she may be crying or squirming because she is about to go).  She will be less likely to get constipated, and less likely to wet the bed when older.  You reduce the use of disposable diapers that end up in the landfill, or the energy consumption and detergent it takes to wash cloth diapers.  Best of all, you are increasing the communicative and trusting bond between child and parent!

I ought to mention that you don't literally have to go diaper free.  Any kind of diaper can be used just in case you miss it, and believe me, you will.  This is not an all or nothing thing.  What matters is the effort, and hopefully the gradual growth.  I never did master the technique, but we did catch most pee's, and my daughter rarely wet a diaper.  I never had to "potty train" her, and she never wet the bed.

Here's how we did it.  When she was born, I left her naked a lot.  Babies don't really go in their sleep, they usually do it when they wake up, or they stir, pee, and go back to sleep.  So, we started with taking her every time she woke up.  We held her with her back to our stomach, our hands under her knees, bum over the sink (usually the bathroom).  We told her it was okay to go by making the pissing sound, and we also taught her a hand signal for pee.  It worked from one day old!  This was amazing to witness!

She would pee at other times, and we had to learn to read her signals.  Often, if she was nursing and pulled off the boob in (what seemed like) mid feed, I knew it was about to come- fast!  For these moments I kept a pee or poo catcher next to me while I was nursing.  I kept it next to my bed, too, for those middle of the night pee's.  We started out using a bowl, but later used a small one piece BabyBjorn potty.  This is my very favorite potty ever made, and I had to order it special on the Internet.  Now you can get them all over.  Just these few changes eliminated most of our wet diapers each day, and she started sitting on this potty on her own at about six months old, shortly after learning to crawl.

Like I said, I never became an expert at it, but it certainly helped my daughter and I bond, made our lives easier and less messy.  It's worth a try.  If you are reading this, and you have experience with EC, I'd love it if you'd comment on your own experience, and if there's any helpful tips that I've missed.  If you want to know more, I'll leave you with a link with EC info and resources to get you started.

http://www.diaperfreebaby.org

Easy Cloth Diapers

This post is just some basic information about cloth diapers, what I've used and how I used them.  People have some pretty strong misconceptions about cloth diapers.  Often, when I told people I used them they wrinkled their nose and made an "Eww, gross" face, or just assumed that I used them because I was so crunchy granola, and that they would never work for a regular person.  But cloth diapers are not gross, time consuming, or complicated.

On the contrary, they are soft and cuddly.  Your house is cleaner when you don't have stinky old diapers sitting around.  It reduces your household waste, and the waste that builds up in our landfills.  It keeps toxic chemicals away from your baby's skin.  It is way cheaper.  They have become a very chic thing to use, and there are so many choices now, but at the time it hadn't really caught on except for among the hippies and the very poor.  We were both.  So, here is how we did it, and it became a very easy, routine part of life.

With my first child, we used cloth diapers almost entirely from birth to potty training.  We bought the Kushies brand from Sears.  They don't require folding, and they have velcro closures.  We bought two packs of eight and two plastic diaper covers.  The entire set cost us less than $100.  We didn't spend another penny on diapers until the next year, when we bought her the toddler size ($100 again), which lasted till she was potty trained.

We kept a five gallon pail beside the toilet.  After a change we would throw wet diapers in the bucket.  If the diaper had poo, we'd plop the poo into the toilet (or scoop it off with toilet paper if need be), rinse off any remaining poo in the sink, and toss it in the bucket.  We didn't fill the bucket with water or soak the diapers, because that turned out to be messy, and made it harder to carry them downstairs to the washer.  At the end of the day, we'd throw them all in the washer (regular cycle).  Then we hung them up inside, and by morning they were dry and ready to use.  The diaper covers were changed if they were wet.  The wet one got hung on the towel rack in the bathroom, the dry one got put on.

There's really not much else to it than that.  My sister, whom I got the "Eww gross!" face from the most, ended up using cloth diapers for her own kids, and commenting on how easy it was.  All I can say is, you never know until you try.