Honor is content to take her time with things 😉 She has always had a strong personality and wants things done her way, and on her time. Well, according to Honor’s timetable, walking wasn’t a priority. So she just started walking about a week ago, on the day she turned 19 months old! That means that elimination communication has been about carrying her to the potty up to this point.

To be truthful, I’m very pregnant, and Honor has been cruising for awhile, so I let her hold my hand and walk along to the potty… but she wasn’t walking to the potty on her own. So it was still very much a me being in tune with her cues thing.

This has been frustrating in some ways, since she is pretty aware of her elimination. I’ve felt like she could really be getting up and going to the potty as soon as she realized she needed to go, but not walking meant that didn’t happen. I’m not sure if I’ve just been idealizing things “when Honor finally walks” or not, though.

Strong Cues

One thing that has emerged over the past few months is very strong cues. Honor didn’t cue much as a baby, even for poops, but now she does.

She often makes a little grunt, and that typically means she either needs to go or has just gone. She’s quite aware of it. She almost always makes the little grunt before she needs to poop, though we’ll end up having days where she doesn’t cue for poops. I’ve also found that intuition for her bowel movements is very high and I’ll often just feel the need to turn, swoop her up, and carry her to the potty. So we don’t miss many of those. But, again, we do end up have a 2-3 day period here and there where she doesn’t do her grunt-cue and where I don’t pick things up. I’m not sure why that happens. I always like it best when we’re on target with cues/intuition!

She does the same little grunt for pees, though that’s frequently right after a pee. We’ll have a day here and there where she has long, dry stretches through the entire day. But on the whole, she still seems to pee a massive amount and very frequently. I hope she increases the stretches between needing to pee, but so far I don’t think she has. It really feels like every 20-30 minutes, which is a lot!

Diaper Back Up and Future Plans

We’re using diaper back up full time at this point because our house has carpeting and it just gives me peace of mind and lets me relax about elimination communication.

Now that she’s walking, I’m ready to reconsider things, but know that realistically it’s going to be at least 2-3 months and probably into summer before I’m ready to move forward from simple EC to “diaper free” and official potty independence. The new baby is due in about 3 weeks, and I’m not ready to go to undies and things with a 3 week time limit, and in the very midst of our homeschooling year.

I have been working with her over the past couple of days to start to learn to turn and back up to her little potty. And she knows that the potty is in our bathroom, and that that’s where she needs to go to use it. We’re trying to avoid having potties all over the house this time around. Not sure how well that will go, but I’d like to have it that way. I’m hoping she gets the “turn, back up a step, and sit on the potty” very quickly, because at that point I can start really considering some tiny undies.

Since she is so very aware of her elimination I do think that we can move things along and have her potty independent by summertime, which would of course be nice for me with a newborn. But I want to keep it relaxed and low-stress, so at this point we’re still paying attention to cues and learning skills needed to self-potty. We’ll venture into undies as the school year winds down and the weather warms up. I have a pretty strong feeling that she’ll take to that routine very easily, so we’ll work toward it steadily.