Summer mornings

The Baby Beast and I have been enjoying our mornings the last month or so. Husbeast has an early morning, summer session of Chemistry this summer, so he's out of the house by 7:30am (right around when the BB and I are waking up).

The baby and I stumble to the bathroom with tousled hair and blurry eyes and use our respective toilets, then after popping a new diaper onto him, he and I head out the back door to the backyard.

I usually have some laundry project to work on, like stuffing the pockets of his diapers. That, and a cup of coffee, helps me relax slowly into the day while the baby makes the rounds of the backyard.



Some mornings, I like to let him do some water play. He loves pouring and experimenting with water, and I love to let him have the freedom to do it - when he's outside (no need to get into the stories of him 'experimenting' with the dog's water dish).



While I stuff diapers (and snap pictures), he learns about gravity and water flow and I can't imagine what else, busily moving water from one place to another, and often pouring most of it down his front.



All good things come to an end, though, and eventually he runs out of water (and patience), leaving his project behind.



And every morning, once he's wearied himself in exploring the yard and yelling at the birds and wiggling his fingers through the fence at the dogs next door, he ends up splayed across my lap, still a baby at heart despite his huge toddler size, nursing to center himself and process everything he's learned that morning.



How do your mornings start?

Dairy (or the lack thereof)

While I've never been much of a milk drinker (it's just yucky), I have always been a big fan of cheese. I cover everything in a fine layer of cheese - salads, roasted vegetables, pasta... truly, the day I found out about cheesecake had to've been one of the happiest days of my life (cheese? for dessert?! i may cry!)

This is why the last few months have been such a struggle for me. You see, the BabyBeast is one of those wonderful little nurslings who cannot tolerate dairy proteins. And I'm one of the lucky 50% of women who pass the proteins through her breastmilk and into her infant.

We discovered the problem when he was about 4.5 months old, and I noticed blood in his diapers and BBLP (more alarming in the BBLP, because there it was, bright as day against the white plastic). His pediatrician put together a stuffy nose, a red ring around his anus, and the bloody/mucosy stools and told me to stay away from eggs and dairy for the next couple months.

I was able to add eggs back in with no ill effect, but since then anytime I accidentally (or purposefully, to test if his reaction has faded) eat dairy, we have to endure three to five days of misery. That isn't an exaggeration. I mean 'misery.'

The BabyBeast is inconsolable. Everything breaks his tiny Beastly heart, from banging his head while crawling to dropping a toy. And he doesn't just cry, he sobs and wails and turns interesting colors.

Well, I accidentally consumed cheese that had been cunningly disguised within my taco (by being sprinkled liberally on top of it). Needless to say, the last couple days have been... colorful. And I don't just mean the baby's face.

Luckily, we've not had a return of the bloody poo, but the stuffy nose, mucosy stools, and general misery have settled in and I suddenly find myself the center of one very angry, fussy baby's universe. If you've ever tried to change a diaper while nursing, you will understand how I am feeling right about now. Especially if, the moment your nipple escape his lips, the baby attempted to turn itself inside-out with fury and misery.

So, I'm back to eye-balling my food suspiciously, and hoping that nothing will sneak in (by walking boldy in front of me and throwing itself onto my food). The pediatrician assures me most babies get over dairy sensitivities by the time they're 12-15 months. I'd find that more reassuring if it wasn't another five months before he'll be 15 months.

I wonder how he'd react if I had goat's cheese? And why is it I only think of that when we're in the throes of dairy-reaction-Hell?

Sumo wrestling babies

Actually, it's not what you think. We aren't over-zealous parents pushing our five-month-old son into sports (but it builds character! you can never have too much character!) when he can't even crawl. This is actually one of the cuter parts of EC (as if the BabyBjorn Little Potty thing wasn't cute enough, right? of course right).

What the BabyBeast is sporting is actually a two-piece EC-wear... I'm hesitant to call it an 'outfit,' because I'd never take him out wearing this. And 'infit?' (on an infant)

He has a prefold, folded to fit neatly between his chunky baby thighs, held up with what is usually called a prefold belt, but I call a 'stretchy headband I bought at WalMart on clearance.' (who said the MommaBeast wasn't smart?)

The point of this get-up (or 'infit') is that it is exceptionally easy to take off when it's time to potty the baby. Or, if you miss the cues and the baby potties on himself, it's incredibly easy to pop the soiled prefold off the baby and tuck a new one under the 'prefold belt/headband thing.'

Also, it maximizes the cute effect of chub.

Amusement

I have found that sleep deprivation can actually cause you to laugh at things that otherwise never would have made a dent on you. I remember the same thing happening on long summer nights in high school, but this is a whole new kind of sleep deprivation (the kind where you're almost asleep, starting to drift into a dream, and a baby suddenly snorts and tries to latch onto your thumb knuckle, as your hand was resting a little too close to his face when he decided he needed to eat).

Things that have gotten me laughing lately include:

How serious the Baby Beast looks when trying to potty.


Teething, creating a whole new face to zombies:


Dogs who know a warm spot when they see it:


No one said parenting was for sissies, but no one mentioned the kinds of things you'd laugh at when you were going on a week of 45 minute naps between feedings. Thank goodness I'm finally getting the hang of side-lying nursing, or I would have to figure out how to sleep sitting up without dumping the baby off the Boppy.

EC - an explanation

So, why bother doing EC?

Well, the diaper rash issue alone would've been a good enough reason for me to start. Seeing what was a bloody bottom turn into smooth pink skin made me a believer, even if it did leave me with several dozens different tubes of various diaper rash ointments sitting around. I wonder if Desitin, Balmex, and Aquaphor can be used in oil painting projects?

If that wasn't enough, what about the positives for the environment? We're doing a mixture of cloth diapering during the day and disposables at night (because i'm just more comfortable knowing i won't be waking up in a puddle of pee and poo courtesy of the baby [yes, we co-sleep; more on that at a later date]) but EC makes it possible to use less of both diapers.

With EC, the BabyBeast goes through fewer cloth diapers during the day (which means i don't wash diapers as often, which means i'm not using as much water and electricity) and I am using fewer disposable diapers at night (which means there are fewer going into landfills and sitting there for a few hundred years). That's a bragging right, I've heard. "My carbon footprint is less than yours!" Personally, I'm not really sure how cloth diapers and disposable diapers add to my carbon footprint, but I'm not going to pass up anything that gives me bragging rights.

If those reasons aren't good enough, what about simplifying potty learning in a couple years? I've heard so many parents lamenting how hard it is to get their toddlers and children to stop peeing in PullUps and start peeing in a potty. With EC, the BabyBeast never gets used to sitting in pee and poo in a diaper, and instead gets an early experience with using a toilet for its intended purpose (instead of thinking it's an excellent place to take a bath; i won't even get into that story, because it left an ex-boyfriend of mine scarred for months afterward when his nephew did it)

But really, it all boils down to the way I'm raising my son: naturally! Everything we do, we do based on the idea that ancient humans wouldn't have had access to... well, whatever! Cribs, diapers, bouncers... and EC follows that pattern.

Ancient people (and even modern people living in cultures where diapering is considered weird) paid attention to their babies and learned the schedules of their infants eliminations, and learned the signals their infants gave before peeing or pooing. And they learned to hold the baby away from their body to prevent being covered in infant eliminations.

I'm doing a more modern version of this; after all, ancient people didn't have BBLPs. And if I just held the BabyBeast out from my body, I'd ruin the carpets. But it is my opinion that EC is much more natural than slapping a diaper on the baby and expecting them to sit in their own waste until you either think to change them, or they fuss enough that you check their diaper.

Speaking of, I think it's time to take the BabyBeast to the potty...

Potty baby

When I first heard about Elimination Communication (or Natural Infant Hygiene) I actually laughed. It sounded completely ridiculous - watching your baby to see when they needed to potty? Putting an infant on a toilet? Babies poop in diapers; it's just an accepted fact in the US. ('wait, what?' you say. 'ec? what on earth are you talking about?' here you go, honey: an explanation of ec)

That was when I was about three or four months pregnant. As time went by, the idea kept coming back into my head, and I found myself reading Web sites and forum posts about EC with babies. It was oddly fascinating, even though a part of me kept laughing quietly and saying, "That's just weird."

Jacob was about four weeks old when I started thinking much more seriously about trying EC with him. His diaper rash was getting alarming, even though I was using a combination of disposables and cloth diapers. We were changing him sometimes twice an hour, powdering him with corn starch, and putting Desitin on the worst spots with nearly every diaper change, and yet he was still getting rash bad enough that it bled in spots.

So, I did what I do best: research. Exhaustively. Until I can sit down and give a lecture and sound like I really do know what I'm talking about.

So, I read The Diaper-Free Baby by Christine Gross-Loh, and then I read Diaper Free: The Gentle Wisdom of Natural Infant Hygiene by Ingrid Bauer. And I looked through the TribalBaby.org Web site (linked in the first paragraph up there). And then I started holding my baby over the Cookie Bowl, as the Husbeast called it (because previously, it had always been used to make his chocolate chip cookies; seeing his son perched over it peeing may have curbed his cravings for awhile).

To my amazement, it worked. More than worked, it worked incredibly well. I could go an entire day and only use two diapers because everything else went into the Cookie Bowl (or the toilet, if the Husbeast was the one pottying the baby, because the Cookie Bowl was sacred).

Because EC was going so well, and because the Cookie Bowl was suffering unpardonable abuse, the Husbeast went ahead and purchased a top-hat potty bowl to make EC easier.



That certainly has made things considerably easier (and freed the Cookie Bowl for its intended purpose, leading me to wonder if things were better before I was able to indulge in cookies frequently) but with the baby growing increasingly large, it was getting harder and harder to tuck all the important bits into the top-hat potty bowl. I've heard that this isn't the case for most people until their babies are crawling around, which makes me wonder if the increased cookie intake is somehow translating directly through the breastmilk.

So, our newest EC-related purchase has been a BabyBjorn Little Potty. And pottying has gotten pretty darn cute.



Somehow, a fat baby perched on a toilet is incredibly cute to me. Is it shallow that I'm thinking less about how much good this is doing and more about how cute the baby looks on his BBLP?

On the positives, his diaper rash has almost completely cleared up. And he is letting us know pretty much every time he needs to poo, and about 75% of the time when he needs to pee. But the most important thing is that he is really, really cute on his BBLP.