Sebastian's not down with diapers these days. I can't blame him. It only took a few attempts at pinning him down on the change table with all my one-handed strength and wrestling with a carefully folded cloth diaper to realize I'd have to let him be most of the time. After a week or two of cleaning up endless puddles of baby pee Alex and I decided to embark on "elimination communication" more seriously. I check Diaper-free Baby out of the library, learned a few things, mustered all the patience I could and have since being trying to coax him onto the toilet. He's not down with the toilet, either. No, he's fascinated with it but, until I came home with a secondhand baby toilet seat yesterday, he refused to use it. Many times throughout the day I watch him open and close the toilet lid, try to flush the toilet, occasionally I've even caught him elbow deep in toilet water. It's almost involved as much cleaning up as just letting him pee all over the place. But that's okay. The other day he saw me spit my toothpaste into the toilet bowl because I was hurrying to hold him over the seat. Since then he's stood at the toilet about twenty times a day and pretended to spit into the water with a cheeky smile on his face. Sometimes I think he's mocking me....
But I know there's a lot of un-training to do. The theory is that along with everyone else babies have the instinct to hold their bladders until they have somewhere other than their pants to go. Hence newborns often peeing as soon as the diaper comes off. But that instinct is muted with diapers until the time comes to toilet train, and by then a kid has followed his instinct for a brief time, been taught to deny it, then asked to reconnect with it. With this in mind, EC makes sense to me. More than half the world doesn't diaper their babies. How could they? It takes so much time, water, energy. They simply know when their kids are going to pee and help them do it somewhere appropriate.
So we're giving it a shot. I like to honour Sebastian's signs that he's ready for changes. With sleep, he led the way. He seems to know when he's ready to leave a phase behind, but needs a lot of help getting to the next stage. I'm happy to do that for him. Obviously the point here is not to potty train him yet, I wouldn't expect that from a one year old, but to respect that he doesn't want a diaper on and find ways to make that a more comfortable reality for us all. I'm not approaching it with full-fledged vigilance because I don't want Sebastian or I to stress out about it. So far I think we're making a little progress.