EC Journey End

It's been a while since we checked in here! Our daughter is only four months shy of 2 years now! ECing has been few and far between. She took to protesting strongly at the use of the potty, so we stopped offering the potty and have been using cloth nappies full time.

We keep the potty around and offer it to her at nappy changes or when she points to her nappy or says "poo" (she is fascinated with her poo, by the way), but a lot of the time she just wants to have a chat about nappies and poo rather than actually needing to do any or be changed LOL.

So we had approximately 6 months of full time EC success, another 6 of part-time EC and since around her first birthday we've been full-time nappy users :) I don't consider this unsuccessful or a waste of time. I think the insights I gained from our EC journey will help us when the time comes to re-learn how to use the potty and the toilet. We intend to EC the next child, whenever that may be and will resume blogging here when the time comes, but until then it's farewell from us.

The blog will stay here for all to read and hopefully it offers other families some insight into EC and the links provided will be of use :)

Peace, love & poo catching to all *waves goodbye*

Elimination Communication With A 1 Year Old

I've been neglecting this blog because there really hasn't been much to report. We're plodding along, content with part-time ECing. We catch almost every poo, and the older she gets the more obvious her poo signals become. We catch all her wee's after she has had a sleep and most of the one's after she's had a feed. Her wee signaling never really returned after she learned to crawl, so we've stuck to the timing catches and little more.

Recently she has decided she prefers not to use the potty and prefers to be held, the way we used to do it when she was a wee baby (no pun intended lol). She really loves having a mirror in front of herself when she's ECing so that she can see our faces too. She finds it much easier to relax when we're smiling at her through a mirror, and also it provides enough distraction so she doesn't get bored. It is a bit of a struggle to kepe her sitting on the potty during her business when she is so on-the-go and interested in the world around her, she doesn't want to sit still when there is so much to do.

We've had a couple more milestone funny moments. Now that she can stand she has done a couple of standing up poos, one when we weren't ready lol. I also had the pleasure of stepping in a number 2 miss the other day, ewwwww.

We will continue with our part-time ECing until she eases into toilet use over the next couple of years. If we get back to our successful cue reading we had in the early days that will be great, but we really don't mind if things stay as they are.

The important thing to us is that the communication remains open and she still has some awareness of her elimination instincts, which has been consistent since she was a newborn. She is familiar with the sensation of eliminating on the potty and other forms of eliminating outside of her pants, so the toilet will never be a terribly new concept to her. Since we've achieved those two things we class ours as an EC success story.

(photo: Mum & Bub ECing shortly after Bub's 1st birthday party).