I’m excited about using elimination communication with Honor right now. I feel like we’ve really come leaps and bounds in the past few weeks. Before we were catching almost all of Honor’s poops, but I didn’t feel nearly as successful with catching pees. I felt like I’d done a much better job with Galen when he was a young baby.

Then I had a chance to read Andrea Olson’s Go Diaper Free. It was a great book and it really helped me a lot. It was motivating and got me really watching Honor’s cues again.

Watching the Time

It also encouraged me to pay close attention to Honor’s timing, something I wasn’t doing. Andrea provides charts with Go Diaper Free, but I have a baby tracking app on my phone, so I used that to keep track of her timing. (I tracked Galen and Brennan’s timing the old fashioned way, with paper, though!)

I was really surprised to see that my girl pees about every 20 minutes! The only time she’s not peeing that often is when she’s sleeping – and she will hold it the entire time she sleeps 🙂

That frequency may seem overwhelming, but as soon as I realized she needed to go so often it was more of a relief. If she starts fussing or grumping I can be fairly sure she probably needs to pee! And right now, at least, she really is like clockwork.

I keep her on a prefold diaper in my lap. When she starts to squirm I can usually look at the cloth and see that around 20 minutes have gone by. I offer to potty her and she’s happy again! Between nursing and frequent pottying I feel like things are going a lot more smoothly with Honor than they were before I really started offering her the potty often. She’s still what I would consider a “high maintenance” baby, but it’s so much easier now.

Nighttime EC

Go Diaper Free also convinced me to give nighttime EC’ing a go. I haven’t gotten it down every night, but there have been several nights now where we’ve had completely dry nights! I think that’s really cool.

It’s getting a lot colder at night up here in northern MI, so that makes it harder to want to sit up and potty her, but I am really going to try and do so.

Honor has period in the night, really in the early morning starting around 3-4am where she’s kicking and grunting and not so interested in nursing. Those are the times I’ve found she wants to pee. Some nights she sleeps happily until we get up (we get up around 5am). Sometimes she’s kicking and grunting and doesn’t want to nurse and doesn’t pee, either. So nighttimes are still a work in progress.

Dressing Honor

Right now with it getting colder I am dressing her in a wool undershirt then swaddling her with her legs outside of the swaddle. She is wearing Baby Legs leg warmers over her legs. I need to get some socks for her little feet now, too!

During the day I’m keeping her dressed for the weather, which is a bit temperamental right now. She’s starting the day off cuddled in long sleeves. I usually layer her in long sleeves with a dress over the shirt. Then she has on leg warmers over her legs (and again, I need to start keeping socks on!) I also keep a hat on her to keep her head warm.

If it warms up I will switch out the shirt for a short-sleeved one and remove the leg warmers. The past few days, however, she’s stayed bundled up!

I keep her in this setup sitting over an open prefold in my lap, with her diaper cover opened under the prefold to keep my clothes dry if I miss. I typically keep my hand down supporting her body at the diaper area, so I feel it immediately if the diaper gets wet. Now that I’m aware of her timing, though, I don’t miss often when she’s sitting in my lap like that.

I can quickly put her in the diaper with the cover if I want to pop her the carrier or if Scott wants to hold her. I have dropped using a Snappi to make it easier to open up the diaper and offer chances to potty, though. I think that’s helped a lot. The cover keeps the diaper secure, and I can again use my favorite diaper fold (the “bikini twist”), which she’s gotten too big to do with a Snappi. Still works fine without, though!

New Schedules Starting

We start our homeschool up again this morning, so I’m a little curious about how I’ll fit EC in with a much busier daily schedule. We change activities around every 30 minutes, and since Honor is pottying every 20 minutes I’m not sure how smoothly that will go. In reality she will be with me throughout the morning, but I am hoping to be able to have her sit on her own during Galen’s “school” time so he and I can have some one-on-one time. I also want that with Brennan, but his kindergarten time is during her normal morning nap time so I’m not so worried about that. Anyways, we’ll see how things go!

All in all I am incredibly happy with how well elimination communication is going with Honor now. We are catching almost all daytime poops AND pees! A few misses here and there (and sometimes a bunch in a row!) But on the whole it’s going really well. I’m so glad I read Andrea’s book Go Diaper Free, because that’s what got me re-committed and having so much success!