Elimination Communication?

I've had quite a few people ask about this strange thing that I'm doing with Alison.  It's called Elimination Communication or EC.  You can learn a little more about it here.  Elimination Communication is the process by which a baby, apparently from birth, recognizes the urge to go potty and communicates that urge.  I had heard about this practice when I was pregnant with Isabel but thought that it was just a bunch of hippy mumbo jumbo so I elected to go with cloth diapers instead.

When Alison was born she used to cry for hours apparently for no good reason.  Then one day my Mom mentioned a guy that she works with at Intel whose wife practices EC and said that his babies were fully potty trained before age 1.  I was intrigued and thought I'd give it a try.  I was willing to do anything to make the crying stop.  It was pretty obvious to me when Alison needed to poop so the next time she gave the signal I took her to the potty and she went.  She was about 6 weeks when we started.  I began keeping her diaper off so that I could learn how often and when she went pee and start to train a potty cue.  I learned that she pee's immediately after waking, and in pretty regular intervals throughout her awake time.  She doesn't have a regular schedule for pooping but she will let you know if she has to go by kicking her legs frantically or crying, or if she's eating she will stop and give me a great big smile.  Magically as soon as the pottying in the toilet starting the crying ended.  It's understandable really, would you want to poop in a diaper?

So, she's 5 months now and she mostly goes in the potty.  She never has poopy diapers and only a few pee diapers during the day when I'm not paying enough attention to her.  She's transformed into a pretty easy going happy girl.  We are so relieved that we were able to figure out what was going on with her.  Yes, it's a lot of extra work to be really tuned in to her and she can't sit on the potty by herself so sometimes it's time consuming but it's pretty worth it I think.  Plus, we can skip over the whole spray solids out of the cloth diaper thing this time around which is a pretty big bonus if you ask me. :)

Please feel free to ask any questions, and feel free to call me a crazy hippy if you like.  Although I didn't vote for Barack the second time around so I'm pretty sure that has banned me from hippy status.