In the weeks since I last wrote here our ECing went awry, or "to poo", if you will. Our daughter got her first cold and she wasn't much up for communicating while she felt sick, understandably. So we resigned ourselves to full-time nappy reliance.
When she recovered she underwent some massive development and her signals changed. She found her voice and decided she'd prefer to use it when communicating her need to eliminate than her usual very clear body language. For a while there we were feeling back to square one with it all, missing round the clock.
Then once again I caught onto her new cues and realised that when she seems really frustrated, bordering on pissed-off (no pun intended) she is telling us her bladder or bowels are about to explode and please hold her over something to catch!
Those couple of weeks where we couldn't understand her cues were hard. Not so much because of the extra washing, but because we had been having such an easy and positive experience with EC until then. I took pride in being able to support my baby as she eliminated, and watching her soil herself had me feeling neglectful. More than that though, was the sadness I felt that I had somehow lost that great communication with her.
I told myself not to be so hard in my judgments, take it easy, everyone has bad days. Take it one poo or wee at a time LOL. The most important thing about communication is to keep the doors open, keep listening and watching and being open to picking up where we left off or learning something new. And thankfully after a couple of weeks of patiently watching and waiting for the pattern to re-emerge to me, it did.
We are back on track now! And now that our baby has found her voice, she likes to chatter away as she does her business :)
When she recovered she underwent some massive development and her signals changed. She found her voice and decided she'd prefer to use it when communicating her need to eliminate than her usual very clear body language. For a while there we were feeling back to square one with it all, missing round the clock.
Then once again I caught onto her new cues and realised that when she seems really frustrated, bordering on pissed-off (no pun intended) she is telling us her bladder or bowels are about to explode and please hold her over something to catch!
Those couple of weeks where we couldn't understand her cues were hard. Not so much because of the extra washing, but because we had been having such an easy and positive experience with EC until then. I took pride in being able to support my baby as she eliminated, and watching her soil herself had me feeling neglectful. More than that though, was the sadness I felt that I had somehow lost that great communication with her.
I told myself not to be so hard in my judgments, take it easy, everyone has bad days. Take it one poo or wee at a time LOL. The most important thing about communication is to keep the doors open, keep listening and watching and being open to picking up where we left off or learning something new. And thankfully after a couple of weeks of patiently watching and waiting for the pattern to re-emerge to me, it did.
We are back on track now! And now that our baby has found her voice, she likes to chatter away as she does her business :)
