Pooping The Baby

You may have heard of Elimination Communication: the modern-day hippie take on toileting that starts at infancy.  I stumbled upon the concept when Elsie was 1-year-old and I started reading about potty training.  By that time, she was really too old for the method, but being an unabashed diaper hater, I was very interested in the idea.  I read everything I could get my hands on.  If you want to read all about it, the fine people over at Diaper Free Baby have written volumes.

The crux is this: a baby doesn't pee or poop without any warning.  You can train yourself to recognize your baby's personal warning signs, then respond accordingly. At any age.  ANY AGE.  But it's easiest to start very, very early.  The sooner the better.  The first window of opportunity closes at about 5 months of age.  After that, it gets harder.

Most of you are probably shaking your head dubiously and feeling the specter of Freudian catastrophe looming over your shoulder as you read this -- but some of you are instead saying, "This is old news!  Back in [Russia... China... India... Indonesia... Namibia... etc.] babies [barely/never] wear diapers at all, and if they're not totally toilet trained long before 2 years, we all start to worry."

Most of the babies in the world do not wear diapers.  Most of the children in the world are not waging wars of potty willpower at the age of 3 or 4.  Most have never heard of "Elimination Communication," because infant training is not some bizarre fringe movement, it is simply the way everyone does it.

I do not live in a place where this is the norm, and I do not have the time or energy to hover over my baby, watching for signs of impending poo and jotting them in a journal.  I absolutely can not adopt any new parenting technique unless it is EASY.  Exactly one detail stuck out to me when I did all my reading up on EC a few years ago: the cuing.  Supposedly, if you can make the same sound every time your baby pees or poops, then after a few weeks, when you make that sound, the baby will pee or poop in response.  Pavlovian pooping.

This appealed to both my practicality, and to my inner experimentalist.  Could it possibly be true?  You can take the scientist out of the lab, but she's still got to test the odd hypothesis.

The very first day Lucia was born, I started making my noise.  I chose, "Psssssss" and used it for both poop and pee.  Lucia has been in diaper virtually all the time since her birth, but like any good newborn, she'd pee in between diapers at almost every change.  Poops were easier.  Babies make hilariously loud and rude noises with every poop.  You don't have to have a clear view of a baby's bottom to know when she's going.  Every time the trumpets sounded, I quietly whispered "Psssss" into her ear.

After two weeks of this, I removed Lucia's diaper, held her up right over the wet one, and said, "Pssssss!" 

She pooped.  Right away, without any ambiguity, my two-week-old baby pooped on command.

We have been doing this ever since.  I always change diapers after nursing and burping.  I hold her up over her dirty diaper, or over the toilet, or I sit her on a tiny potty, and I say, "Pssssss!"

I give her two to five minutes to respond, refreshing my cue every 30 seconds or so.  Sometimes she goes.  Sometimes she doesn't go.  But it is more than coincidence, because if she doesn't go, she won't poop again until later in the day.  At first, she hated this (and hated traditional diaper changes, too), and I sometimes had to stop quickly because she was so worked up.  But she has gotten used to the feeling of cold air on her hindquarters.  Now she gurgles and coos through her toileting.  Very happy baby.

Lucia still occasionally poops in her diaper -- maybe 2-3 times a week.  She also pees in her diaper a great deal throughout the day.  But she poops in her potty about twice a day every day, and pees about six times a day, every day.  We are catching almost all of her poops.  That means very few blow-outs, very seldom any need for change of clothes.  We go through about half as many diapers as we otherwise would, because most often, I can reuse a diaper between changes.  We use only one wet wipe per change.

She doesn't preform well for crowds, but I can't blame a girl for preferring privacy and quiet for such delicate matters.

Strange as it may seem, this is what is going on in your bathroom if Lucia and I are visiting. I nurse her, burp her, and then excuse us.  "Time to go poop the baby!" I say, apologetically.   I don't know if it will continue to work out so well as she gets older, passes a few more developmental milestones, and starts eating solids, but I am tickled pink by the experience so far, and I will keep you posted.