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.

It's the little things

The little things get you through the day when there's a newborn in your life, I find. And I mean the very little things.

The little fingers...


The little chin...


The instance of a sudden little arm-jig...


Of course, the little things also have the tendency to throw your life off. Like the shoes that fit just fine before you got pregnant, and somehow seem to've shrunk one size while they lazed away in the closet waiting for your return. I'd tell myself that it's just an excuse to go shoe shopping, but I have no intention of taking the baby out of the house until he's six weeks old. While I'm sure he's getting plenty of immunities from my breastmilk, I'm just not too keen on the idea of taking him out into the general Unwashed Masses just yet.

Besides, I have yet to figure out how to get the Moby on and the baby in the Moby without feeling like I'm either
A) wrapped by a boa constrictor OR
B) about to have a newborn slide down my belly, across my thigh and off my (still bare because i haven't gone shoe shopping) foot to land somewhere across the living room.

Yes, I have the little Moby booklet for how-to-wrap-yourself-and-still-be-able-to-breathe, but at this point it seems as if the baby is entirely too floppy to be of any help when I'm inserting him. It's like trying to do a samba with a partner who took a couple Valiums to 'take the edge off;' you know how it's supposed to look and how it's supposed to work, and yet somehow bits keep flopping out all over the place and you end up getting sweaty and flushed trying to make it all come out right. Not to mention the judges watching from the sidelines are frowning more and more each time your floppy companion's head lolls alarmingly to one side and you have to use you chin to prop it back up while trying to figure out what to do with their left arm.

I'm not even going to touch on breastfeeding in the Moby. Yes, my breasts are big, but I just don't see how I'm going to manage to lift one of them up to my collarbone to get it near enough to the baby's mouth to tickle his lips.

To delay the building scream of frustration, I'll just keep thinking of the little things... little fingers. Little toes. Little nose.

Day One

Five years ago, I swore I would never have children. I had decided that they would be entirely too much work (and would ruin my beautiful body). I was too self-centered, I said, to ever be a mother (of course, at 22, who isn't pretty darn self-centered?) and besides, I had dogs. Who needs babies when you have dogs?

Of course, that was before I became involved with my husband (well, now he's my husband; back then, he was 'Sooooo cute'). He may not have galloped up on a horse, or been wearing anything all that shining, or even have been knighted (as i'm told proper Knights in Shining Armor are supposed to be), but he was exactly who I wanted to be my life partner, and somehow meeting him kicked things into gear.

So, somehow we ended up married (I'm a little foggy on the details, as the whole thing went rather quickly, but I do seem to remember the friend who promised to make our wedding arrangements sobbing to me over the phone at 2am one night).

So, somehow we ended up pregnant (and I say 'we' because I made sure he suffered with everything I suffered with [my complaining would've made anyone suffer] and I also made sure he rejoiced over every little thing I rejoiced over, even if I had to tell him through gritted teeth, "BE MORE EXCITED").

And while initially I wasn't very attached to the little life growing inside of me, after a few months I found myself excited by the sound of a heartbeat during an ultrasound, the sights of tiny legs and arms waving on the grainy realer-than-real-life image, and the feeling of gas - no wait, a baby! - inside my abdomen.

What I find amazing, though, is that although I never intended to be a mother, once I found I was one, it took no thought at all to decide what aspirations of motherhood I had.

With all the things out there these days meant to make a mother's life easier - formula! cribs! strollers! playpens! jumpers! swings! bouncers! - I never strayed from the easiest path, the path that called to me: natural mothering.

That is why when people ask me how I'm raising my son, I can always answer, "Well, naturally!"