My experience of EC

The beginning

I began to leave my first daughter partially without nappy around 13-14 months, taking advantage of the summer. I tried to get her to sleep in the afternoon without a diaper and put her on the potty as soon as she woke up and it started working. I finally realized that babies don’t pee during their sleep, but they wake up, pee and then go back to sleep if they’re not bothered by feeling wet. At home I always kept her in underpants, trying to create a rhythm to propose the potty: in the morning I changed her wet nappy, we had breakfast and after about an hour I took her on the potty in the bathroom, maybe making her feel a little water flowing. Then we went out for an hour and on the way back we went straight to the bathroom, we ate and before bedtime we did another stop on the potty. Of course, some of the pee ended up on the floor, or in the underpants, or on the waterproof changing mat, but this is to be considered… On the other hand, she was at the age when she was learning to walk and to get up alone from the sitting position, so if the pee didn’t come right away she didn’t want to wait for it… One trick I took was to remove the carpet from the living room and not let it get on the sofa if I assumed it might be near the time of pee.

As for the poop I tried to put her on the potty when I realized that she was going to do it: the first week of attempts went always well, then she began not to want to sit on the potty, as if she was “scared” by what came out of his body. So I let her do it in nappies or underwear for a couple of weeks and then I tried to put her directly on the toilet with a reducer, like the “big kids”, and she liked the news. If the session was successful… she could also press the flush button and say hello to his poop.

Little by little she learned to do her needs in the toilet and to warn when something was missing (“poop” was also valid for the pee…). In the meantime I started using washable nappies  instead of disposable ones, until around 18 months I decided that I could trust her and leave her without diapers even outside the home, obviously taking her regulary to the bathroom. Only one time she get wet “in public”, she was about 22 months old and was in the middle of the “no” phase: I had taken her to the bathroom because I was sure that the pee was going to escape but she had set out not to do it, five minutes later she could not hold it back… Luckily we were in an outdoor farmhouse!

We never woke her up at night to take her to the bathroom. Luckily for us she used to sleep about 12 hours straight and then in the morning the nappy remained wet until two years, until for a few weeks she began to wake up still dry. It was July and since summer favors a reduced diuresis we took advantage of it: we removed the nappy even at night and we did not use it anymore.

A newborn on the bidet

With my second child I tried from birth to make him do his needs outside the nappy and his whole process was easier and more natural than his sister. Immediately after every feed I sat on the bidet or on the toilet with my forehead towards the wall and I held him in my arms telling him “pss, pss” to invite him to pee: nine times out of ten within a few minutes he would pee and poop. In newborns it is easy to use the gastrocolic stimulus to discharge them out of the nappy in a comfortable and more physiological position. He made in diapers very little poop, especially when I did not have time to take it to the bathroom immediately after breastfeeding. With the pee instead I had some more difficulties: I often left my son in his underpants on a crossbar or on the changing table in order to identify the signs that indicated an imminent urination, but I seemed not to catch them. So I relied more on the clock: I tried to put it in position on the bidet or on the sink every half an hour or so. Basically, between a meal and the next nappy change, he peed 1 or 2 times. At night instead we privileged our rest compared to his physiological needs: when he woke up my husband changed him, I breastfed and then he went back to sleep immediately after. Nappies were usually wet, but he hardly ever pooped.

From month to month it has lengthened more and more the distance between a pee and the other, while he continued with the habit of discharging immediately after the meals. Around 6-7 months we started to use a reducer to put on the toilet. To avoid confusion I initially avoided using books or games when sitting on the toilet, so that he could focus on what he had to do. Over the next few months, I noticed that if he was immediately distracted by a book, he sometimes set doing nothing, but if I told him to think about pee – or pushing to poop – and then we would look at the book, then he concentrated and do it.

When he was 17 months old, he started saying “pee” when he felt the urge to do something, sometimes he barely got wet in his underpants but then he held back the rest, while if he needed to poo he arrived clean to the toilet. At 20 months the rhythm was consolidated and rarely he wet his underpants: when he woke up in the morning the nappy was often dry and then he peed in the toilet, then I accompanied him – or he warned me – even after 2/3 hours, before bedtime (which lasts 2 or 3 hours), after bedtime or snack, before dinner and before night. At 21 months, with the first hot summer nights we removed the nappy even to sleep, with excellent results apart from some “accident” if he drank a lot before going to sleep.

What can be useful to remove the diaper?