I finally hooked up with a group of mothers practicing elimination communication last week. I found the Orange County group through www.diaperfreebaby.org, which is a free network of support groups across the world (like La Leche League, but less formal). Yes, the internet world is making it impossibly easy to meet like-minded parents in the area – Bradley classes, La Leche League, attachment parenting groups through meetup.com, diaperfree babies, and OC Baby Wearers – it’s almost getting to be too much.
In any case the diaperfree meeting was friendly and productive; we made baby leg warmers!
See, now that the weather has gotten chillier (well, it’s crept back up to 80, but it was 70 for a few days…That’s 27 Celsius for everybody else in the world. Brrrr), getting Christian undressed quickly to go to the potty has become more time-consuming. So I read with interest that diaper-free babies often wore leg warmers, instead of pants, around the house in cold weather. It seemed like I could make a pair simply enough – or buy a pair online for $15 – but neither of those things ever happened. What happened was that I was just pulling my own socks up onto Christian’s chubby little thighs and letting him look like a silly jester around the house, with the ends of my too-large socks dangling off his legs.
I was delighted to hear that the moms at the next diaperfree meeting in Huntington Beach were going to make leg warmers. All I had to do was bring a pair of knee-high socks. I brought four pairs of my own knee highs (because when do I ever wear them in sunny southern Cali?) and was slightly mortified, but not surprised, to find that everybody else had purchased brand new socks to make the leg warmers. Ah well, mine turned out cute anyway.
The process was super-easy. One of the moms, the host actually, had a serge machine, which really simplified the whole process. In a nutshell, we cut off the foot of the sock and used the center portion of the foot to make another cuff for the sock. We basically followed the instructions from this useful instructional photo set on flickr, called Baby Hope. Click on the picture of cute Baby Hope below to watch the quick 15 picture slide show that shows you clearly how to baby leg warmers.
