So, while I am very excited to be involved in elimination communication, I have not stopped using diapers.
I still miss so many pees that I don’t feel confident enough to let him go about nudie. But we did have a day (only one day) last week where I only had two wet diapers the entire day. The rest of the day, I just peed Christian and put him back in the dry (cloth) diaper.
Also, it is difficult to pee Christian while we are driving somewhere or when he is sleeping. He has, though, gone pee several times at my friend’s house and once in the bathroom at the grocery store – so I know that he’s okay with slightly different peeing circumstances. We are broadening our horizons slowly. He still doesn’t pee with his dad; but I think that’s simply because he finds his dad so amusing that he’s distracted.
As far as sleeping goes, I sometimes am able to catch the first pee after a nap IF I get him as soon as he is stirring. If I wait for him to kick up a fuss, like when I want to finish chopping onions in the kitchen, then I always end up catching a wet diaper. The bigger problem has been night-time pees. When he stirs in his sleep I am reasonably sure he wants to pee, but bringing him to the bathroom makes him MAD because he doesn’t want to wake up. It’s a catch 22, because wet diapers make him mad/unhappy also and usually wake him up as well.
I thought I could use his potty and just bring it up to the bed and hold the potty in between my legs, so that he could stay relatively asleep and pee, but then I discovered that he wouldn’t pee in his potty! The picture in my last post was a little misleading, because Christian usually pees with me holding him suspended over the bathroom sink, not in his hot pink potty. I think that the newness of the potty, and perhaps the feel of the cold plastic on his thighs was throwing him off. In any case, in the last couple days he has begun peeing in the potty as well as in the sink – but only when the potty is right next to the sink and he can see himself in the mirror. When he is completely comfortable with that set-up, I am going to try and move the potty down by the bed. Luckily there’s a mirror there too.
I don’t think the mirror is important per se, but Christian is used to giggling at the baby in the mirror. It also helps me see whether he’s peeing or not. If you can believe it, I can be holding him directly in front of me and still not notice when he pees, especially if i don’t have a mirror in front of me.
The most interesting development of this elimination communication is a heightened bond with Christian. I am starting to have a much better intuitive sense when he needs to go and I am more aware of how is is struggling to communicate with me all the time. Also, I now feel that it is my responsibility to respond to him when he needs to pee or poo – otherwise he becomes very unhappy. I can’t ignore any fussing! Since he is starting to understand that he can eliminate in a place other than his diaper, I now feel badly when he fusses, fusses and then releases into his diaper, because I haven’t reacted quickly enough. I think it’s frustrating for him – frustration in a general baby way of understanding, not that I think he’s getting mad at me in particular.
We are starting to be more in tune with eachother. Perhaps there is a diaper-free future for us; it’s a thrilling possibility.
(Darn! He just woke up with a wet diaper because I was trying to publish this post before tending to him. Usually I pee him when he has a wet diaper just because it’s easy and he’s already out of his diaper. Often I find that he’s willing to release more pee to empty his bladder that way. Well, just now I figured that he’d just gone, so I was nursing him back to sleep diaperless but with a diaper on my lap – and he peed on me! Sheesh. I need to just stick to listening to him right away and giving him lots of pee opportunities. Btw, that was only the second time Christian’s peed on me since we’ve started elimination communication a couple weeks ago.)