You may remember a post a few months back about our plans to "
go diaperless". Many of you have been asking how it's going, so I thought I'd take a few minutes to fill you in.
First of all,
"diaperless" is actually a bit of a misnomer for us. I guess that's why so many people using this method prefer the term
"Elimination Communication". While we're at home in the city, we use a combination of cloth and disposable diapers; cloth during the day and disposables at night. The cloth diapers (without plastic covers) allow us to really tune in to Abi's timing, since we can feel immediately when she is wet. Also, the cloth diapers provide a bit of extra motivation for us to pay attention to her signals and give her plenty of potty opportunities,
because, let's be honest here, no one likes to get peed on! When we're in the village, Abi doesn't wear diapers at all during the day, only a loose fitting pants. We use these because all our laundry in the village is done by hand and absorbent cloth diapers would be a real pain! However, even in the village we put her in disposables at night, because we all like sleep just a little to much to be fussing with anything else!
We started sitting Abi on the toilet for her morning-pee when she was just seven days old, so, as you can see in the pictures,
she's pretty comfortable with the whole process. In fact, we suspect she even likes it! Paul and I really like it as well; it's such a good fit for our lives, especially village life! It is so amazing to practice EC in the village where it is second nature to everyone (except us, that is!) For example, whenever I'm letting Abi "go potty" in the village, one of the young girls will automatically run to the well for a pan of water to wash her bottom with. Honestly, I probably wouldn't even think to ask for water, but theses little girls totally know the drill because it's
absolutely normal for them! So many aspects of our lives seem odd to our friends in the village, so it's really nice to do something that's viewed as completely normal!
Beyond enjoying the cultural relevance of the EC method, we have to admit that
we really love not having to deal with too many poopy diapers! By now, I would say that we catch about 90% of "twosies"; in fact, in the last two months I can only think of 4 instances where we had to change a poopy a diaper! And now that Abi is starting to have stinkier, sticker grown-up-baby poops (I know you all wanted to know that), we're especially happy that most of that poo goes directly in the toilet!
For those of you who are still skeptical, here's proof! I think she's about 6 weeks old in this video.
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