We have been doing EC now for close to half a year.  Five and a half months we have been putting Nathan on the potty, holding him over toilets/buckets/sinks/gardens etc. and cueing him to wee.  Poos tend to come when he needs to during a wee offering, though he sometimes lets us know that he needs to poo.

So right from the start the elimination bit was working a treat…well, it’s going to work one way or another, I guess.  What I mean is that he eliminated in a suitable receptacle when offered.  I simply couldn’t believe how easy it was to start him using the potty/toilet/bucket.  The communication part was working, I guess, from our end since he knew what we meant and went when offered if he needed to.  The communication bit from his end was a lot longer in the making, or at least I didn’t pick up on it if it was there.

We tried potty hitting for months.  The idea is essentially that you leave a potty in his play area, and every time he plays with the potty you put him on it.  Every time you offer a wee on the potty you also hit the potty and get him to hit it before putting him on.  Research shows that this method works, though I found it quite difficult because he loves to play with his potty…it’s great for putting toys into, hitting to make a sound, turning it over and more hitting….so he started to get grumpy with me when I put him on the potty and I just gave up offering when I had just done it and he went straight back to playing with the potty.  Still, over the last month or two he seemed to occasionally hit the potty and look at me , and when I sit him on it at these times he generally did a wee.  He also often did the potty refusal thing…arching his back and refusing to bend his knees.  I started taking that as being a sign that he didn’t want the potty…so also a form of communication!

Up until very recently I did all the potty offering on the basis of timing and/or intuition.  However, nearly 6 months on and we seem to have had a breakthrough, of sorts.  The other sign for toilet that we have been using is patting the our thighs.  I’ve been using this so that we can still communicate when we are out and not near a potty.  Just before Christmas we realised that he seems to be using this sign, and so I have now stopped offering so much based on timing and waiting more for Nathan to tell us he needs the toilet.  I constantly remind him verbally to let us know if he needs to wee, and he seems to be trying to tell us quite regularly that he needs the toilet.  We do, however, have a lot of signing when Nathan doesn’t wee and these confuse me.  I sometimes wonder if he just wants my attention, or or maybe he just gets excited and slaps his leg.  I know it is hard for him to learn the feeling of needing to wee and then communicating it prior to actually weeing, so I guess it is all a part of the learning process.

Truthfully, I’m amazed at how well EC is going.  I never expected Nathan to be essentially out of nappies before he was a year old, but there you go, that’s what’s happened.  I have been sewing up a storm, trying to adapt a free pattern I found online for training pants to be made the way I wanted to make them and fit Nathan.  We now have 8 pairs of training pants and I love using them.  Nathan hates having nappies put on, so he seems to prefer his ‘undies’.  They are easy to pull down when we need to put him on the potty, they take up less space in the washing machine than the nappies did, and Nathan no longer has the big cloth bum look so his jeans and pants will fit him for longer.  We do still use nappies at night, not because Nathan needs them because he is dry most mornings but because the very few night wees that we miss are large and need the absorbency of a normal nappy to contain them.  The photos below are of some of the training pants I’ve made and Nathan modeling the first pair of training pants I made him.

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This entry was posted on Friday, January 2nd, 2009 at 4:39 pm and is filed under Nathan's first year. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.