Peeing Vs. Going #2

I thought that BMs would be easier to train than peeing, but now that I'm a couple of days into more than occasional Elimination Communication, I'm finding that #1 is easier to train. DS successfully peed in his potty twice yesterday and once today. All of the incidents occurred after waking in the morning or post-nap. We had a spraying incident yesterday, but the other times DS waited until I had positioned him on his potty chair and for me to give him the psss-psss signal before he peed. This is big progress for us, because in the past DS would often pee when I lifted his diaper off.

When he did go into BM mode, I put him on the potty with his clothes on so he could start associating sitting on the potty with going #2. (He usually finishes his BMs too quickly for me to get his diaper off to get on the potty.) Since he started using a baby potty chair, he stopped following the pattern of going #2 right after eating, so it's hard to predict when he'll go. So we'll focus on peeing for now.

Having saved a couple of disposables through EC just over the past couple of days, I've been motivated to find a greener diaper alternative but became overwhelmed quickly after reading about gdiapers, tushies, happy heinys, bumgenius and other flushable/cloth variations with cute names. I tried Huggies' Pure & Natural diapers, which are made of organic cotton and some renewable materials but don't really do much to reduce the number of diapers in landfills. I also obtained a pair of the open-crotch diapers that one of my sisters brought back from a trip to China and am keen to give them a try.

As my co-blogger and other EC-ers have mentioned, success in EC means changing the parent's attitude about elimination and what is acceptable in terms of convenience, messiness, and not expecting that a baby will be diaper-free overnight. I do think someone should invent a just-in-case diaper that is easy to pull off for EC training, but maybe that's unrealistic and, echoing Morgan's earlier blog post, would just be an infant-potty-training crutch. The important thing is that DS thinks that getting on the potty is a new game and it doesn't disrupt his routine or make him upset. In fact he quite enjoys sitting on his potty chair and being out of his diaper.