Hey y’all,
He had a big win today! As many of you will know, we’ve been practicing elimination communication with our three-week-old son. We’ve been doing awesome with pee, but poop has been a little more challenging.
Poop is supposed to be one of the “easy catches” in elimination communication, but we’ve missed it so much. But today, we got two entire poops in the potty!
For anyone wanting some advice on elimination communication and how it fits in with your life, just be aware beforehand that there will be a lot of missed eliminations at first. And also, crying apparently is not a sign to take them off the potty. It’s just a sign of ‘this is weird-I’m not used to eliminating yet.’ But screaming and wriggling away are signs to take them off the potty.
Also, as far as timing goes, a good rule of thumb is to sit or hold them over the party for 5 minutes. When my son first started, I had no idea what I was doing, so I just took him to the bathroom about every 30 minutes and would hold him over it for about 2 minutes. That was how long it took him to figure it out at first. Now he pees straight away, but when I think he needs to poop I definitely hold him over for about three or four minutes before he even starts. Then it’s a good 10-15 minutes of waves of poop. There are periods of several minutes of nothing, and then a huge wave of poop.
I’m still learning my son’s potty cues, but generally he gets squirmy right before he needs to go. When I think about it now, that makes sense since I also squirm when I really need to go, but I totally didn’t connect that at first.
I had absolutely no idea what to do, and I’m only just starting to understand some of this. More than anything, I think practicing EC has heightened my parental instincts. At least a quarter of EC is just having the feeling that your child needs to go. You learn A LOT by doing.
All that said, I feel like this is so good for our son. He’s not sitting in his mess, and even when he does eliminate in his diaper, I usually realize before he even cries, so he’s getting cleaned up much faster.
Good luck with all the things!
Metta!
Frugal Treehugger 