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Adventures in Part Time Baby Pottying: Lucy and Isaac from Sydney, Australia

Adventures in Part Time Baby Pottying: Val and Baby Alex

Discover Valuable Insights in The Stories of Parents Practicing EC! How do they combine their busy modern lives with being part time nappy or diaper free?

What can your learn from someone who has a similar story to yours?

For ages now we have been marveling at the cute sounds he makes, and one of them, we now realise, is his attempt at replicating the ‘pssssss’ sound we make when we potty him! He lisps (so cute) ‘thhhhhhhhh’, and it nearly breaks my heart every time! We are proud and amazed that he is ‘signing back’ already. We never even expected it, really – we just kept on with the ‘pssss’ because it’s what we did. Anyway – cool!

Dear Charndra,
I’ve got a very active 6 month old and he mostly runs me ragged!

First, let me say how much I love your site and your helpful and friendly insights in many respects.

Secondly, I’ll share a bit of our EC story, in chronological point form to save space!

We started EC in baby’s first week and had lots of catches. We used bamboo terry prefold nappies at this time. Isaac (baby) initially cried whenever we held him over his bucket/potty, but seemed to relax once the widdle/poo came out!

Isaac became a very colicky and high-needs baby for the next couple of months. This made everything, including EC, really hard, because he seemed always to be screaming. We gave up thinking about EC for a while and focused on, well, surviving, although we still offered wee/poo breaks at nappy change times. We caught lots of poos because he went about 10 times a day for months. We later discovered that he has a dairy/soy allergy and when I cut these foods out of my diet he improved a lot, pooing much less and being much less unhappy. Made me sad to think that he was always in pain and I didn’t know, but in any case I think pottying helped because it helped him get rid of the painful diarrhoea and gas that resulted from the allergy. Poor babe.

At 3 months he started to settle down a bit. I subscribed to your weekly emails, Re-read your blog and started EC again. This time we had great success. Many of your hints were spot on (such as ‘baby wriggling and pulling off be breast = probable widdle’) and I found that ECing really helped in our overall parenting. I started getting much more confident leaving him with nappy off and pottying him on cue, and had lots of success. As I think you mentioned in your blog, the best thing about EC was that Isaac looked so grateful when we pottied him at his time of need! It was really rewarding.

At 4 months, things started generally to go downhill. Isaac started waking very hour at night (visibly distressed). I started looking for buildings to jump off, I was that shattered with exhaustion (having never had decent sleep since he was born, and with husband away for work). Again, focused shifted away from EC and towards other things in the hope of working out what was wrong and how I could help us all get more sleep.

In retrospect I think the problem was a complex combination of reflux, a very busy and active baby and a slowly declining milk supply (his poor feeding and, I think, my anti-dairy dieting and general exhaustion, combined with his impatience, caused my let-down reflex to slacken and my supply to weaken… Eek! This was a really hard 6 weeks.) I have to say, our troubles were compounded by frankly shithouse advice from GPs, pediatrician and early childhood nurses (told me that because he was developmentally advanced I should start ‘pushing solids’, that he was bored with breastmilk and needed something new, and that there was nothing I could do to stop him weaning even though he was so young).

I’m glad I was determined to keep breastfeeding because we were headed towards premature and accidental weaning and we are now back on track, no thanks to professional advice. Grrrr… We practiced EC but not with much success because I was offering too many wee breaks during feeding, thinking he needed to go, when the issue was actually that he was pulling off the breast because he was bloody starving for milk and the milk wasn’t coming out quickly enough. Poor baby! Poor mummy! I spoonfed him a bit of rice cereal (professional advice!) before deciding that the solids thing was bollocks, since it did not improve his sleep at all, and I decided he wasn’t having enough milk during the day to justify filing up on starchy old rice cereal. We now do baby-led weaning, which includes rice cereal for breakfast because he likes it, along with lots of finger foods at other mealtimes.

At 5 months I started focusing on trying to increase my milk supply in anticipation of returning to part time work, and because I wanted to better satisfy my busy, big boy. I was very discouraged at first, but early success gave me confidence and I have increased my supply using a combination of drinking more water, taking fenugreek, taking calcium and magnesium supplements (I was probably deficient in these as a result of dieting and an insufficiently dedicated GP), and pumping with a hospital grade electric pump I hired from the chemist. I have always fed on cue but feeding on cue isn’t enough when your baby is simply too busy reaching milestones to be bothered with silly old milky!

At exactly six months baby started crawling. He also started sleeping slightly longer stretches at night (2-3 hours).

AND – drumroll – at six months and two weeks we have just realised that he is now telling us when he wants to go!!!!!!!!!!

For ages now we have been marveling at the cute sounds he makes, and one of them, we now realise, is his attempt at replicating the ‘pssssss’ sound we make when we potty him! He lisps (so cute) ‘thhhhhhhhh’, and it nearly breaks my heart every time! We are proud and amazed that he is ‘signing back’ already. We never even expected it, really – we just kept on with the ‘pssss’ because it’s what we did. Anyway – cool! He doesn’t always tell us, because he is so busy chasing physical milestones (I caught him doing a downwards dog today – readying for standing up???) so there are lots of misses, but luckily our living room rug is a vegetable-dyed afghan so you can’t see the evidence 🙂

We have much further to go with EC – particularly with night pottying, which we dare not try yet because our sleep is already so fractured and our baby so easily roused into full awakeness. But we will! I am about to buy your book so we can learn more.
Best,

Lucy

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