Speaker 0
Welcome to the Free Birth Podcast, a supportive space for people who are learning, exploring, and celebrating their autonomous choices in childbirth. Together, we'll unpack truths, share personal stories, and claim our ability to birth freely and intuitively. Here's your host, Emily
Speaker 1
Saldea. I have a very exciting announcement to make. The official Freebird Society membership network is now live. We have abandoned mainstream social media and created our own private network, a truly safe space where women can be free to talk about pregnancy, birth, holistic mothering, and, of course, radical birth work. And you don't have to be a hardcore free birther to join. This is for any woman who is curious about natural birth and natural mothering and who wants to explore any of the ideas that we touch on in this podcast in more depth. It's also a great resource for women who are planning a free birth, a place to share stories, ideas, information, and most importantly, community and support. Head to our website at free birth society dot com to apply. We are so proud of this new space, and we can't wait to welcome you. Come join us in the fun. We're back this week with Andrea again and this episode is all about elimination communication. We are here to demystify it and give you both the tools and the confidence to get you and your baby started. Let's teach our babies that diapers are not their toilet and experience deep levels of connection and communication when we honor their dignity and their instincts. And by the way, yes, you can do this. And it's actually really truly not hard.
Speaker 2
We already covered your wonderful stories last week, so I just wanna dive into elimination communication. And like I was just saying before we were recording, you know, you've kind of become this, at least in my world, from my sphere, you've become kind of the face of this, of this of this movement of taking back, you know, what is so normal. And, you know, we're gonna weave in some of my experience too and some of my personal questions, throughout this conversation. And and our goal for anyone listening is to walk away with an understanding of, of what not only what elimination communication is, but to really feel like you have the tools to start it. Because, you know, when we pitched this idea on Instagram and and let people know that we were gonna be doing this episode, what I was really taken aback by was how many comments of women saying, oh, that sounds amazing, but I don't think I could do it, essentially, is is what I we we kept seeing, and, you know, Andrea is here to demystify it with me, because you absolutely can do it if you want to. It does take, you know, some level of awareness and willingness, of course, but but I personally have found it to be, extremely easy easier than I thought it was gonna be. And so I'm just so excited to have you here, and get to pick your brain and and collect your wisdom for this podcast because I know a lot of people are excited for this.
Speaker 0
Awesome. I'm so excited to be here. I was very excited to see that, your entire audience was like, yes. We wanna learn about EC. Mhmm. No. You know, elimination communication is basically what people have done for all of human history. Instead of using diapers, believe it or not, they didn't really do that before well, let's see. Disposables were invented in nineteen sixty one, really.
Speaker 2
Oh my god. That's like yesterday.
Speaker 0
I know. And nobody wanted them. Nobody wanted to put their baby in paper, and, they didn't want them at all. So I actually one of my mentors worked for Pampers for it was either twenty five or thirty five years. He has, like, patents on his wall for the newborn cut diaper. Like, he invented that. Woah. So I I met him and I was like, oh, you're the enemy. I met him here in Nashville in the cafe. And I was like, you're the enemy, but I really wanna talk to you. Totally. Get to know you. So we met, and, I blew his mind talking about EC. He couldn't even talk to me for a few days. We had to get back together and talk again, and he was like, wow. You really changed my whole view on how far we've gone as diaper companies. And and, basically, he admitted to me that they hired a pediatrician back in the sixties to advocate that parents wait for readiness, this mysterious ready that child saying, I am ready to be potty training, which is freaking ridiculous. Think about it, people. It's marketing, and it's really exquisite marketing, to where people even get really defensive about late potty training thinking that they're doing the right thing. But if you really look at the root of it, they hired a pediatrician who is still the head of the Pampers University. And, he advocated that parents wait for readiness based on a study that has no science in it. You can look it up online. It has no scientific backing at all.
Speaker 2
Like, so many things in birth and parenting.
Speaker 0
My gosh. So many things. So so we're basically being told how to parent by a multibillion dollar, network of companies Yeah. Who have created a product, not to go conspiracy theory, but let's think about it. How many disposable diapers have been thrown away with pee and poop in them and chemicals over the last, it's been now forty, sixty, sixty years, and none of them have ever biodegraded. There's about twenty seven billion landfill a year. That alone, though, doesn't change behavior. We still
Speaker 2
use them.
Speaker 0
We don't care. And the reason is because we think we're helping our children by putting them in them for longer, but we're really just helping those companies. So And I don't even
Speaker 2
know if it's that we think we're helping. I think it's that also the age of convenience and not questioning, anything, you know, and just being fucking television zombies, you know, and just that it's it's it's what they give you in the hospital. It's what, you know, your mom did with you and, you know, anything outside of that even cloth diapering is labeled so successfully, you know, across the mainstream as hippie or or stupid or hard or, yeah, challenging and just all of these ways to oppress the true or suppress the truth. Yeah, which is which is exactly what you're saying. Yeah. It even goes back to, like,
Speaker 0
our sort of subconscious view of savage and, like, you know, indigenous cultures. We they we think of them as impoverished or, like, we scapegoat and all of that stuff. And if we do what they do, then we're not modern and we're not civilized and all that stuff. You can get really deep with it. Mhmm. Essentially, we're not teaching our children to deal with their pee or poop. Right. Their waste is just sort of buried away, and that's kind of symbolic too. So you can get really philosophical. Totally. But, really, the bottom line is is that we have been robbed of our our wisdom in this area because of these multibillion dollar companies wanting to sell stage six diapers. I mean, these anyway. So EC is basically what people did before diapers, and there were cloth diapers weren't really invented and used until about two hundred years ago. So you're talking about hundreds of thousands of years in our current human form that think about it, really think about it. Do you think the human race would have survived this long if we were peeing and pooping like incontinent little mammals all over the cave? No. We wouldn't have made it this far. We would have disease, and we would have destroyed ourselves. So like any mammal, just like with birth, like any mammal out there, we all have instincts that we're born with to not soil ourselves. So EC is based on this instinct, and really, we think about it. You're giving your child you're allowing your child their dignity. So you're allowing your child, to be heard, and you're communicating with them. And, oh my gosh, the look that a newborn will give you even, a couple weeks old, I have a four week old now, almost four weeks. The look that they give you when they see that you get them and you understand that what they just cried about was that they they weren't wet and they weren't pooped in. The their their diapers weren't pooped in. They weren't crying to tell you that they need changed. They were crying. If you just back up and zoom out just a little bit, they're crying to tell you to get the diaper off of them so they could go in alignment with their instincts and hygienically. Because, again, we're not gonna soil our den or our caregivers ourselves. We just aren't built that way. We're intelligent human beings from birth. We're not stupid. We're not born dumb and incontinent. Mhmm. So if you are aware of this
Speaker 2
We make we make our babies incontinent.
Speaker 0
We train them into diapers, and then three years later, we train them out of it, and it's hell. Let me tell you something. I have never potty trained any of my five children. I've never had a potty train. Now I wrote a book on potty training because people would find me past the EC window of zero to eighteen months, which is really when it's ideal to start and finish the the whole process. So in nineteen fifty seven, ninety two percent of American babies were completely potty trained done by eighteen months. This was four years before disposables were invented. So or were hit hit the market. So think about it. Just in two generations, our babies have gotten that much dumber and that less capable? No. There's no way. It's just market. So we can we can Well,
Speaker 2
it's the same thing with birth. Right? It's like all the same principle. Same
Speaker 0
thing with breastfeeding.
Speaker 2
All of a sudden, we didn't just, like, not know how to birth or not know how to breastfeed.
Speaker 0
No. Breastfeeding, birth all of that stuff. Everything, you know. And and I don't okay. So I wanna tell everybody. So most people say I can't do EC. Wow. That sounds great. And what you're talking about, you're really speaking to my heart, and I just love what you're saying.
Speaker 2
Mhmm.
Speaker 0
And then they don't take action because, a, they don't know what in the heck they're doing, which makes sense because how would we know? How would we know? We're a diapering culture. There's no blame here. Like, we we've all been misled. Even our pediatricians have been told by the diaper companies in their textbooks of how to become a doctor, how to become a nurse. It says that they don't have sphincter control to eighteen months. I mean, there's so many lies, so so many pervasive lies. Oh, and honestly, your baby can actually get UTIs, medical conservation, if you train after two years old. There should be disclaimer on every package of diapers that say that this could harm your babies.
Speaker 2
Yeah.
Speaker 0
So we really we really have been robbed of this wisdom, and it's nobody's fault. But when you have the information, well, Andrea, what am I gonna do about it? Because it sounds like just one more thing that I have to do, and I'm already overwhelmed. I have no time, no energy. I'm completely, like, floored. I'm a new mom. I don't even know where I begin. And all of these objections come up in their minds, and I get it. Because when I was starting with my first baby, I had read the book, Diaper Free Baby, and I had tried to wrap my head around it. It was even hard for me. That's why I wrote my book, Go Diaper Free, because I wanted a how to with videos and and a community that supports you. You know, I needed that. I didn't have that. So I think a lot of parents, especially moms, don't start because they don't have the information, but But also they think it's gonna be harder or messier. You know, you have this imagining that they're gonna be peeing and pooping all over the floor. That is not how it is. So when a baby wakes up, just like when you okay. When you wake up, do you have to pee?
Speaker 2
Right. Yes.
Speaker 0
Okay. When you have just had a a warm coffee or something maybe within thirty minutes or an hour, do you have to usually pass a bowel movement? Okay. Baby. Yeah. So think about a baby. When they wake up, they have the same hormone, antidiuretic hormone, which we have, was it more of in pregnancy? I always get the facts backwards because of my brain. It's gone with five babies, but whatever hormone it is, it makes us pee all night when we're pregnant. You also it also keeps so this hormone, it keeps us dry at night and for pooping and peeing ourselves. We can take advantage of nature, you guys, and realize that easy is super easy because it's in alignment with nature.
Speaker 2
Right.
Speaker 0
And you just realize when my baby wakes up, I'm gonna take them to the bathroom and offer, like, right when they wake up. Before this hormone wears off and their bladder fills, take them. And guess what? Within a day or two, they start holding it. They start to understand what's happening.
Speaker 2
And, obviously, we don't even have to take them all the way to the bathroom. Right? If we're still recovering from birth, you can have a little a little bowl or a little potty. You sell a little potty. Right?
Speaker 0
I do. Yeah. It got take we couldn't find them anymore, the Top Hat potty they're called, or potty bowl. And so I had them manufactured recently, and they're, like, they're on tiny undies dot com, my Cool. My sister site. But, yeah, you can put you can potty you can even if you're recovering and having a hard postpartum, you can lay them on a mat, a pad, or, wool underneath a sheet, or you can just get any kind of changing pad. And you can just queue along with them as they go, and you watch them and you go. So making a running noise, p s s s s. When they're going pee, this builds sound association. Within a couple of weeks, when you're ready to get up and try to potty them, you hold them into position, which I'll explain in a second, and you make the piss noise, and they've already been conditioned to understand. It's like teaching a puppy to scratch at the door, to go outside, and then when they go or to whine at the door. And then when they go outside, you say, go potty, and then they go, like, on command almost. It's this if you have to go, now is your chance. Right. It's great. Yeah. Babies totally get it with repetition. So if you're not so here's the deal, everybody listening. Oh my goodness. You can do EC part time. And if you do EC part time, some would even call it half assed. You actually might not have to potty train at all. And if anything, you might do, like, a little weekend wrap up session before they're eighteen months. You can do this completely half assed and and it has great benefits. Also, by the way, whoever wants to change a blowout diaper? Right. Exactly. Why don't you sit there and you know your baby's pooping? If you're listening and your baby's been fifteen months, you know your baby's pooping. You know when. So you just say, wait, get the diaper off.
Speaker 2
Totally.
Speaker 0
Hold them in position or stick them on the toilet and then go
Speaker 2
It's like almost no cleanup. Oh, so you do a grunting with the poop?
Speaker 0
Yes. On the poop, I do a different signal.
Speaker 2
Oh, I do the same on both. Is that bad?
Speaker 0
No. It's not bad. So there's no right or wrong with AC. The cool thing about it is, like, everybody does it a little bit differently. Now the way I teach it is extremely linear because it covers all the points and makes it completely easy and dummy proof. But you can vary from it to whatever length you want. It doesn't matter. There's no but it's are you communicating with your baby? Does your baby understand what you're saying, and do you understand what your baby is saying? And every time you don't understand, are you committed to learning? Like, hey, maybe I'll just tweak this. Because guess what? Your baby is so forgiving. It doesn't matter if you screw the whole thing up for sure. And resilient. Yeah. They're so resilient. They just appreciate that you're trying.
Speaker 2
No. Totally. It's like And actually, I found with the pooping that because I'm just waiting for her cues and then holding her over a sinker toilet, I actually don't even really need to do the sound with bowel movements because I'm not queuing her to poop. She's actually queued me to poop. You know what I mean? Yep.
Speaker 0
Yep. I totally know.
Speaker 2
Yeah. So I don't have to so now that I'm, like, thinking about it lately, we actually don't even do it for that. I just do it for peeing.
Speaker 0
And eventually, the noise the noise cues go away and, you replace it with a word. Okay. Time to pee or time to poop. Or you just you just do it. You just bring them. And the key to EC as they get older to prevent resistance is to give the keys of the castle over once they start walking to real like, get rid of the diapers after they've mastered walking if you haven't already. Daytime diapers go bye bye. On Tiny Andes, I created Tiny Andes because my son had nothing to wear when he was ten months old and out of diapers. There was nothing that fit him, and it it's just sucked. And he was peeing whenever all over the floor, and I was like, this is the same as I bring. This is terrible. Right. Yes. If if you can, you will, especially if you're a boy baby. Sorry. But they're very conveniently minded, and they're like, I'll just let a little out and keep pee. So I, I have training pants that are all cotton. I have regular underwear, and I have, these pull up covers that I was just dying. Nobody had them. I was dying to get some, so I made them. And with any combination, whatever you want, whatever works for your carpet or your stress level or whatever, the backup changes when they start to walk to something that encourages communication and that is does not feel like a diaper. So then you're able to teach and train and give them all the tools that they need, this repetition routine. It's like teaching them to eat with a fork, or it's like, you know, changing from breastfeeding, transitioning slowly to eating solid foods, baby led weaning, some will call it. So there's this you're just teaching, and you are providing boundaries and explaining. They know how to go to the bathroom. They're born knowing. Right. But you have to teach them what receptacle to go in and how to get their pants off. So if you don't do this and you wait till the everybody your mother-in-law is telling you, you have to wait till two or three. If you wait till two, it's gonna be so hard. What what do two year olds two year olds say all the time? My twenty two month old no. If I tell him, do you want a piece of candy? He says, no. And then he said, yeah.
Speaker 2
Wait a minute.
Speaker 0
Yeah. Wait. I do. So don't try to wait. If you're already past eighteen months, I do have a potty training book. It takes an average of seven days. It's actually super freaking easy, and it's it's abrupt. It's like you're done with diapers, you do the training. It is noncoercive, but it is not BS ing around. You are doing it. You can do that at any age, so don't feel guilty if you miss the EC boat. But if you're in that range, just doing a little bit just catch the poops. For God's sake, just catch the poops. The poops are, like, the grossest thing to clean up, and they're the easiest thing to usually to catch and to get into a rhythm with. And then get the morning wake up pee, just those two things.
Speaker 2
Mhmm.
Speaker 0
You just do those two things, and maybe every time you change your diaper, you potty them because, hey, the diaper's off. They're probably gonna wanna go. Mhmm. If you did those three things, those are what I call easy catches.
Speaker 2
Oh, good. That's what I'm doing. Those are the three things I'm doing.
Speaker 0
And, you know, on my YouTube channel, those are some of my most popular videos are the four easy catches. So there's one other one too before, you know, when they
Speaker 2
get out the car seat,
Speaker 0
you know, it's just like transition times. Transition. Yeah. Any two year old need to go? When would a four year old need to go? When would you need to go? Think about it as when would this baby probably need to go? And we don't wanna over offer, but we also wanna get into a rhythm, something predictable, and we wanna use the same words or noises every time.
Speaker 2
Right.
Speaker 0
And, basically, like, you can start anytime if you're listening between zero and eighteen months with just those easy catches and figure out what one or two things work for you. And and if that's all you wanna do, that's it. Good. Because you're teaching your child, this diaper is not a full time toilet. This diaper is a backup. And when we are in tune, we get it in the toilet, And then I see my mom go in the toilet. My dad goes in the toilet. My brother is in the toilet.
Speaker 2
Yeah. And and I've I do things like when, you know, when she goes in the toilet, it's celebrated. And if she goes in the in the, diaper, I apologize to her. And I'll be like, I I see that I missed this. I'm sorry. I know that this is not our preference, you know, and I just, like, talk to her. Not, like, shame her or anything because it's totally not her fault, but just, like, talk to her. And whereas when she's in the toilet, you can see how proud she is. Proud. She's looking up at us and she's smiling or she's, like, pooping and clapping and, you know, it's it's just so obvious. And so a couple of things. So I wanna back up to Yeah. The stages of kind of what does it look like for a newborn, like like, literally, what what would it look like for a for a mom having her new first baby or first baby to try this with, into just kind of the different phases up to eighteen months. And then, also, I just wanted to say that something that moved me so much that got me, on board with this when I was pregnant was, I also read that book, Diaper Free Baby, and and it was great. And, actually, I'm lying. My husband read that book. That he and then I I transmuted it from him by osmosis. So actually, what happened was in the pregnancy, my husband said, you know, what do you want me to do? What do you want me to learn? You know, you obviously seem like you've got this, so is there anything that that you need of me? And I said, why don't you read about elimination communication because I don't really want to, I have some resistance to it, I'm not sure why, but we should obviously do it because it seems like the right thing to do. So you go ahead and read about it and you can pioneer that, and when baby's here, you can kinda be, the leader for that if that's how this pans out. And it actually worked out really well for us. But what moved me so much, so I wanted to throw into this episode, was just, how as a nanny in Los Angeles for a long, long time, I wasn't I was a nanny to many kids who were in the process of being potty trained, and it was so fucking traumatic Yeah. For the kid and for the parents. And I I worked with this family who, this is really common all over all over the world, I think, that, the kiddo was going to be in daycare and a requirement of the daycare was to be potty trained. And so all of a sudden, these parents find this out over the summer, their kids starting, the kids maybe like two, the kids starting day care in August, so there's this very tangible deadline, but the parents have no tools. And like you said, they've been, you know, unconsciously training their kid that the the diaper is the toilet, you know, for two years of their life and then all of a sudden, this poor little thing and this poor little set of parents has to figure out what is, obviously a formula for a lot of stress. And as we know in in the older years, you know, our our sphincters and our our sex organs and where we go to the bathroom and how we go to the bathroom and even if we're able to go to the bathroom is also tied to, stress and trauma and feeling safe and all of those core chakra, root chakra, you know, principles. And so, I just wanted to make sure to mention that this is a whole another level of, like you said, you know, giving and honoring your child's dignity but and it's setting them up for a feeling of safety in their most, you know, most like intimate spaces that absolutely will affect, you know, childbirth, orgasms, you know, relationship to bathrooms and and it just all of it. It's such a big deal because as we know as a society, we shame, all of that stuff, you know, especially in in girls, you know, I I have met girls who will not poop in their school, you know, and and so it because of the the embarrassing connotation to it, they will actually constipate themselves like young girls that I've met. They will not go to the bathroom in schools, You know, or or or I've met parents and I've watched them change their baby's diapers and they're like, oh, God, this is so fucking disgusting. And they're doing that over their poor sweet little baby's face. And so elimination communication offers a complete shift away from all of that into, a gentle and safe road map that is going to affect more than we we can even really comprehend. So, you know, that that's the space that that interested me and and admittedly, I had some resistance to it because so many mothers who ultimately I do trust and believe were saying it was easy and I just was like, there's no fucking way that's easy.
Speaker 0
It's easy because it's based on nature, and that's
Speaker 2
the same
Speaker 0
thing with birth. Like, my birth a couple weeks ago, sorry, but it was easy. Yeah. It was easy because I was in alignment with nature. Exactly. And and that's really the basis of it. That's the whole crux of everything. What you're saying touches my heart. I mean, it really is sad that we are told that we're gonna damage our children psychologically if we train them early. I have on my blog post so I have a blog at go diaper free dot com forward slash blog. I have a ton I have so many free resources. There's so at the end of the podcast, I'll share, you know, where you can get my easy start guide, which is free, which helps you wrap your head around the basics of it. Oh my gosh. So what bought so there's this article on my blog, that was written by one of my certified coaches because I have a trained parents to teach this as well in community with real life people. And, she wrote up this whole article that was just about all of the different studies that have been done. None of them prove that early potty training is damaging. None of them say it. Even doctor Hodges, he only surveyed he specializes in, encopresis, like, poop disorders for three year olds and above, and he surveyed a hundred and twelve people in his practice. So, of course, it's totally a biased skewed study. And all it said is if you don't fully drain your pee, if you're trained early, then you're gonna have issues later. Well, if you're doing EC, you're gonna fully, like, let go of all your
Speaker 2
grasping and stress.
Speaker 0
Yeah. You're not gonna have any stress related to peeing because it's natural.
Speaker 2
Anything can traumatize a kid if it's contained with pressure and shame and and all that stuff. It's how you do. And that was what I loved about the book was that
Speaker 0
the one I read or
Speaker 2
the one that my husband read was all about just be chill. Like, just be relaxed and approach this just how you how you said before about, you know, the
Speaker 0
Natural. Touches
Speaker 2
and the keeping the energy around it, mellow and celebratory and and loving and safe because, duh, we are training our babies in in our energy fields are training our babies.
Speaker 0
We are, and we're we're sort of we're modeling what is normal, what is it like to be a grown up human being, and our babies are paying attention. If we do baby wearing, they're able to really see and watch and observe what we do, and they prefer that. It's like the continuum concept really informed my early parenting as well, and just the way the stone age Indians would do it. There's so many things that just we've lost. So all the studies in this blog post that I have also, all of them say that early potty training is better and that delayed after two years old. This is actually delayed, you guys. Two years old and up, potty training is actually late. Okay? It is not developmentally appropriate. If you have a two year old or up, there's no no no blame, no shame. We're in a diapering culture. Just get it done, and I can help you with that. But it causes and and has been known to cause UTI and medical constipation. But think about self esteem wise. You're you're having go into a corner in your daycare around other kids and poop your pants. Mhmm. What embarrassing and shaming, and why do we think that's the gentler way? It just drives me nuts. Like, we have been completely brainwashed, and it's by exquisite marketing. And trust me, I'm trying to learn the way of the marketing of the diapers so that I can use it with EC because I want I wanna do what they do. You know? They're really good at it. But, you know, just get you thinking, like, what do people do in the world right now where there aren't diapers? Well, unfortunately, disposable diapers are infiltrating everywhere, and nobody has a landfill to to help. In Thailand, when I went a few years ago, Diapers all up on the side of the road. And three and four year olds in Bangkok wearing diapers, disposables. And I
Speaker 2
just, like, got it. Rural villages in India and seen, and seen absolutely seen diaper free babies, and diaper free toddlers. And, I mean, I remember before I was even super deep in the birth world when I went to India for a long time and I was like eighteen or nineteen, I remember noticing that before I even knew about EC. And, you know, I I remember seeing women in the streets with their little babies on their legs, you know, with some oil and doing infant massage and all talking and, and all these babies being, diaper free and doing infant massage just so normally, and that was when I came home and was like, okay.
Speaker 0
That's awesome. And and so some parents listening to that some parents listening to that are like, woah. I can't have my baby without diapers. You guys, diaper free does not mean diaper less. I use backups. I have my baby in disposables right now as a backup. I reuse the same disposable at least five times today.
Speaker 2
Nice.
Speaker 0
So I'm not using that many. And I don't feel bad about it because honestly, I have five kids, and I cannot I cannot
Speaker 2
And we should just say that, like, I mean, you already kinda said it, but Yeah. You don't have to be about feeling bad. I mean, this is and there's no you know, the goal it's called elimination communication. So the goal is to communicate around And
Speaker 0
to learn about each other. Learn. Exactly.
Speaker 2
And it's so just like free birth and the entire, you know, point of this this podcast and literally everything I do in the world is reminding and encouraging and and bringing light to that that mama's instincts actually do know best and that we can trust those and that we're so inundated with the lie that we have to turn outside, you know, for dealing with our babies and it's just simply not true. And so, this is a shining example of that. So let's let's get to some some
Speaker 0
Some nuts and bolts.
Speaker 2
Practical. Yeah. So, let's go newborn first, and what is that what does that look like from, you know, day one on?
Speaker 0
So with my first, I started right away with sound association and observation. Yeah. Because I read diaper for baby. I hadn't read my book yet. I wrote my book when he was five months old, which is very how to. I'm sorry. None of the other but I know all the other authors. They're wonderful, and and all of the books offer something really unique. Mine is the one that's, like, the how to. How do you do this? Because I had a hard time with my first one. My last four babies, I've started from day one, from moment one because I felt confident with it. But When
Speaker 2
we're saying starting, you mean catching?
Speaker 0
I mean, like, holding them over the top hat potty. Yeah. And, like, making the noise right away and, you know, getting them when they wake up right away. So here here's how I so with the first one, I just I sorta eased in by and I did we did catch the first meconium with the first one.
Speaker 2
Oh my gosh.
Speaker 0
Saw him grimacing, and we were like, we don't wanna clean that up off his butt too.
Speaker 2
Yeah. And
Speaker 0
perform. Yeah. Put olive oil on your baby's butt to prepare for that first poop. We didn't have to do that, so I held him over the actually, my partner at the time stuffed the toilet underneath him, and I was holding him. So, oh, this is how you hold them. For an in arms baby, so you wanna talk about newborns who don't have any neck control Mhmm. Or crawling semi mobile babies. You don't really wanna do this with a walking baby, but you can in a public toilet. It's really helpful. You hold them into this deep squat position. So, there are pictures of this on my website, but, basically, you hold them underneath their thighs, and their back is laid across your like, on your sternum. Like a bucket. Yeah. So you're like the baby's leaning up against you in front of you. Their head's right underneath your head. You're both facing forward. You've got your hands underneath their thighs, and you're kind of aiming. And if there's a a boy child, you can aim their penis with one of your fingers, which is pretty easy when they're small. So that's the in arms classic hold.
Speaker 2
Talk about the multitasker mom. Right?
Speaker 0
And while you're trying to aim as
Speaker 2
a Yeah. That's okay.
Speaker 0
Let me tell you though. Both of my girls pee straight out when they're little babies.
Speaker 2
Oh, really?
Speaker 0
Harder than the boys. Oh, funny. I mean, you can cup it with your hand and then but anyway.
Speaker 2
So, yeah, I wanna talk about the newborn stage specifically because I want you to explain, because I wish I had known you back then and I could have asked you this then. I didn't start it right away. I mean, I started the, like, observing and the noise, but but the actual catching because I felt, you know, it's my first baby, I felt like she was pooping and peeing all the time. So I didn't really learn her rhythm. She didn't even really have a rhythm, it seemed. I could have been I could be wrong. But it just seemed like she was she was pooping during breastfeeding. She was peeing all the time. I I didn't know how to yeah. So it took a while. It took a good couple weeks of observing that and her kind of chilling out and getting a flow for me to feel like it was even reasonable to to to to catch them, but I know that's not actually true since you did it from birth. So, yeah, maybe demystify that a little bit for anyone who felt the same as me.
Speaker 0
Absolutely. So when you have a newborn, they only pee or poop. Supposedly,
Speaker 2
what
Speaker 0
the hospital will tell you is one time for every day they are old. And that's how they gauge if your baby's got the eliminations going well or not. And, I've I've had two of my babies in the hospital as you know. Although we weren't there long, we broke out of the jail very quickly. But I I enlightened many nurses by pottying them, and they got mad at me because they wanted her to pee in this diaper with this little pad in it. And I was like, well, I just caught her pee on this bigger pad. Like, she was naked. It was The nerve. Wouldn't take it. I was like, whatever. Okay. So with a newborn, they are not gonna pee and poop that much. So it's the best time to start because they're not going all the time. Their plumbing hasn't really started working yet. They're gonna have a for first couple of days. Then when your milk comes in, when you get the porn boobs, your baby's gonna get the good milk. You know, the not they're all good. But the the milk that's, like, streaming and you can't get it to stop, like that photograph on your Instagram recently. Uh-huh. The so that changes their poop to the seedy, mustardy, greenish to yellowish, really bright oftentimes, runny poop. Now when that's about to happen, you know, you get a little bit of warning, but it doesn't happen very often yet. So the first week, if you start the first week, it's amazing because, basically, you can see are they getting uncomfortable. So okay. First of all, when they just wake up. So they sleep all the time in the beginning. So when they wake up, the first thing I do is help them eliminate themselves, eliminate the waist so they can feel comfortable and really latch well. If a baby needs to pee or poo or burp, they're gonna pop off the breast. So that's actually a signal that you know they need to go. So you might think you're having problems, issues with letdown or pee. I mean, sorry, or breast milk, supply, all that stuff. But it might actually be that your baby needs to go to the bathroom. It doesn't go comfortable. Yeah. How can you mean? I can't go I can't eat breakfast.
Speaker 2
Totally. So Yeah. You
Speaker 0
know, you can if they're going point.
Speaker 2
Right? Like, before you can clip your tongue tie, just just make sure they're they don't have to pee or poop.
Speaker 0
Exactly. Yeah. You're yeah. You you wanna look at this whole picture. So you zoom out, you look at the whole baby. Well, part of the baby that we've been taught to ignore is the elimination. They they don't have a rhythm to anything in the beginning, and I've been really frustrated with sleep lately. Obviously, everybody is, but I I don't think I've had a full night sleep in eight years, and it's kinda getting to me. It goes in waves, but, like, you know, being pregnant or having a baby all the time, nursing, I I have not had much sleep. So when, yeah, when they wake up, they have to go to the bathroom. So they're sleeping all the time in the beginning. When they wake up, just hold them over and make that noise. Run some water if you need to. I I often potty my babies over the sink, which people think is gross, but I
Speaker 2
don't know. That's when I do it.
Speaker 0
It's so easy to clean it. I'm just like, I'll even take a bleach wipe and wipe it out, you know, like, every day. But oftentimes, I just run some warm water, rinse it down. It's benign. It's breast milk.
Speaker 2
It's like And physically for me, for for the mother, it's easy to hold. And I had a neck issue for a lot of
Speaker 0
a lot
Speaker 2
of my first year with her, and there was no way I could pretty much hold her in any other way. So
Speaker 0
Absolutely. And if you can't if you've had a c section, you can't hold
Speaker 2
her at all. Right.
Speaker 0
You just have her on a pad, and you do the sound association.
Speaker 2
Mhmm. It
Speaker 0
is helpful. And if your partner's there, guys are really great at taking on this role. I love that your husband, read the book first. I have a lot of dads who buy my book and, like, read up on things, and then that's their job with the baby because they hear it
Speaker 2
like you. I love it. I think it's so good as a feminist who constantly sees men, in my opinion, overstepping or stepping or under stepping in this arena, it just did with birth and pregnancy. I I love it because it doesn't overstep the mother's, you know, experience and the breastfeeding and the birth and all of that. It's like this other thing that, you know, that the dad I found for me personally with with my partner that he actually I was telling you this the other day when we were talking. He's even was more tuned in to her elimination communication than I was because I was very quick and I'm better about it now, but she's almost a year old. In the beginning, I would anytime she would make anything, you know, any uncomfortable noise, I'd be like, oh, she's hungry. And immediately go to get my boobs out, and he was like, hold on, Maybe she just has to pee or maybe she just has to poop. And he was right so much of the time. And that was very impressive to me and it it really, really increased their bond, guaranteed. I mean, that was for them to have that and it wasn't like I didn't do it, but he was definitely the leader of it. And like I said, I I became injured pretty quickly after I had her, and so he really handled that. And it it was beautiful. It was beautiful to see and in no way encroached on what I was doing with her.
Speaker 0
It's awesome. My husband's awesome at it. Sometimes he'll, like, pat and soothe, and I'm like, you're soothing her into peeing in her diaper, honey. And he's like, oh, yeah. Sorry. Sorry. It's so ingrained even in him. So, you know, we we definitely learn to support our partners, our men, our husbands, even our same sex partners. And we wanna give that role, the one who's not doing the breastfeeding, the one who's not doing although waking up all night with the baby, it's a great role to have is to be the EC daddy or whatever, you know, whatever the situation is. You know? I think, so newborn. Very nuts and bolts, you guys. When they wake up, you offer the potty. When they make that face where they're you think they're smiling at you and they're like, oh, look at her first smile. Oh, she's smiling at me, honey. And then you hear explosion. You're like, okay. I learned that was not a smile. That was a grimace, and that was a signal that she needs a poop. And next time, I'm gonna say wait, and I'm going to open up the diaper, and they can hold it. They have signature control at birth.
Speaker 2
So you say wait?
Speaker 0
I say wait because Interesting. Cool. It's a thing it's repetition where when they're a little bit older and they start to make that face at the highchair, which has really common between, like, six and twelve months, they start to poop in the highchair because they're sitting and they're relaxed. And they're like, I'm just gonna go right now. If they're wearing a diaper, why not? So you see them grimace at that time and you say, wait. And we we have run through our house so many times. It's hilarious because it's Yeah.
Speaker 2
I just I just did this morning. Yeah. Like, poop coming out of her butt. I was like, wait.
Speaker 0
And some people might think you're in service to the child. This is like doting. This is too much. No. We are helping them with what they can't do by themselves until they can do it by themselves. And then between twelve and eighteen months, which is the Montessori sensitive period for this particular task, this hygiene task in the Montessori preschools, if they're doing it by the Montessori book, which they should be, but many of them don't anymore. Twelve to eighteen months, they're wearing cotton pants in class. They're all going to the bathroom. It is that task. At that age, they are gaining control and mastery of their bodies.
Speaker 2
Beautiful.
Speaker 0
And we're teaching them where to put their waste,
Speaker 2
and it's super important. It's also, you know, partially selfish that, like, I don't I don't want to clean No. Shitty cloth diapers. Like, that doesn't I've done it. It doesn't interest me. This is better. Okay.
Speaker 0
And let's go We're gonna we're gonna move into cloth after she's kind of out of the fourth trimester, and I and she's a little bigger, and I've got my whole stash. I do a really quick easy EC diapering where it's not all snappied and done up and everything. Easy on it.
Speaker 2
Okay. So let's talk about that. So do you feel okay. So we're still in fourth trimester. You're offering it. You're doing the you're, waiting for the grimace. Anything else around newborn stuff?
Speaker 0
Yeah. So when you feel like you've had a miss, which is our term for an accident because it's not an accident. It's that you guys have missed the communication. You've missed the signal, whatever. You maybe missed the toilet. That's happened before. Yeah. I mine peed all over my foot the other day because I was trying to Oh, yeah. My eight year old something and but I you know, he got to clean it up because he was anyway, long story. We're we're doing a fam it's a family thing in our
Speaker 2
house. Mhmm.
Speaker 0
So, yeah, we're looking for when they wake up, when they're pooping, during a diaper change, because often people who don't do EC will get peed on when they're changing a diaper, and they think it's the cold air hitting the genitals. That is not true. It is finally, you idiot have figured it out. Right. Diaper off me, I'm gonna pee. Yay. Totally. And then, we condition them to go into their diaper. We really work
Speaker 2
on them. I mean, they're born and then we're like, this is what you do. Like, you're gonna have to poop and pee and then this is what you you do. So exactly, I love it. I love the idea of starting from from day one and I'm excited to do that with my next because Yeah. Exactly. You're teaching them from day one whether you like it or not. So if you aren't doing anything and you're just doing diaper culture then you're teaching them that. If you're catching and and and again, you know, remembering in the newborn stage, if you're honoring your forty days, if you're trying to stay in bed, if you tore, if if you had a c section, any of that, I mean, really, regardless of your circumstances, if you just had a baby, hopefully, you're resting as much as possible. And so, you just have a little potty. You can buy one from Andrea. There's others online. You could just use a bowl and you just keep it near you so that you don't have to be getting up and going to the sink if that feels like a little bit, you know, like you're not quite ready for that. You don't have to leave your bed. You can do this from your bed.
Speaker 0
I had leftover Chuck's pads from my first birth, which was the home birth with all the midwives. And I I just pottyed him over that. I'd fold over a quarter of it, potty him on it again, and I used all those up because I need to say I I felt bad about throwing this away too. Yeah. So the other thing that's really important is if you have your baby diaperless now some people do easy with no diapers completely the whole time. Sometimes this can be a problem, if you do too much diaper free time. So, yeah, your newborn's gonna pee all the time. They will pee less often if there's something that they instinctively can resist. So if you think about it, like, if I am wearing this, then I'm gonna be a little bit more likely to tell my mom or my dad that I need to go even as a newborn. If I'm not wearing anything, I'll just pee a little here, pee a little there, pee a little there. They're gonna go more often. Interesting. To consolidate when they're wearing the right backup, and the backup can be a disposable. A disposable with the cloth inside of it. It can be, a cloth diaper. It could be just those workhorses, which I love, that are just the insert of the cloth diaper that have a little Velcros on them. Mhmm. It can be anything you want it to be. In India, they have these little underwear that they'll wear, and they'll just wash the one every day if it gets soiled. It's a backup, not a toilet. So
Speaker 2
Mhmm.
Speaker 0
If you start from day one, even with just EC awareness, which counts, you're aware of their movements, which is way more than most people who are just doing whatever the culture's saying. And, again, nobody's to blame here except for these companies who wanna make money.
Speaker 2
Except for who's to blame, which is not you listening. It's not
Speaker 0
the parents. I'm not I I mean and people will defend, oh, we late trained and it was so easy, and I'm like, great. For you. That's great. This isn't for you. But, you know, if this appeals to you and you're like, woah, this is crazy. So you can use any just any backup you want. Typically, if you're gonna use diapers for three years and then at night probably for six years, then think about using diapers only for eleven or twelve months is way less, and you're you should pat yourself on the shoulder for that, and you're gonna reuse them a lot. So I like to use a combination of cloth and disposable depending on the stage of the baby. At night, if I want them to sleep more, usually, a disposable will help them sleep more, honestly, because my baby's just cloth. They're like, oh, that feels so good, and they'll just pee in it and they don't care. So there's every baby's different. Right? And no guilt with the newborn, though. If you have them naked all the time, they'll probably pee all the time. I know
Speaker 2
a lot of women in the free birth community and and myself included, you know, keep keep the baby pretty naked in in if circumstances allow, like, I was on Maui, so it's very easy to for me to be naked and the baby to be naked. And just, you know, would lay her on, reusable pads. And what I found it's not like she was always naked, but what I found was when she was naked, it upped the Annie for me to be more aware of her because I didn't want her peeing on everything. And so, the days that we intentionally were like, we're gonna stay home and she's staying naked and we're gonna give her the opportunity to pee every twenty or thirty minutes and we set a timer on one of our phones and we did that for three days in a row right before we left just to, like, dial it in, and it was awesome. And we were we were on so on top of it, again, incentivized because we were, like, letting her be on us and on our couch and, you know, we weren't, like, we weren't diapering her and, and yeah, she was only a couple weeks old and we set a timer and it we made it be a thing for a couple of days and didn't leave the house because otherwise if we left the house, we were gonna obviously diaper her. And, and and it was it felt like training a puppy. We just did it. And every twenty minutes, we had her over the little baby Bjorn thing with the noise and she didn't pee every time, you know, it was just a quick, like, hey, you wanna do this? No. Okay. That's fine. And if she missed it, we would set the timer for, like, ten more minutes or something. And then if she did pee, we'd wait thirty or something. It was totally not, it might sound stressful listening to it, but it wasn't. It was totally like a fun thing that we did to get on top of it. And it it I guess the lesson I learned, because she she seemed like fully trained after doing that for a couple of days, and the lesson I learned from that, and then again, now cut to eleven months later where she hasn't pooped in her diaper for whatever it's been four months, is you get out what you put in. You know, by by doing that and by upping the ante of my personal investment in it, she responded. She she has responded to any amount that I've done. So, I've we've moved, you know, three times since she was born. So, there's been totally times in with my neck issue where I'm just like, it's not happening today. Like, I can't even pick you up.
Speaker 0
Which is fine. Yeah. Of course. Of course.
Speaker 2
And and so I'll just, like, tell her, like, hey. It's not happening today. I'm sorry. And, you know, and then we have, obviously, we're using diapers and and whether it's cloth or disposable or whatever and and I guess the point of that was it's just been so fascinating and so, so such a lesson in motherhood and not just in motherhood but in relationship that I am getting what I put in. The days that I'm on it, she's down, you know, because she's gonna poop or pee regardless of how I feel about it. Right? She's going to poop and pee. And so if I'm on it, and I'm aware and I'm tuned in and I'm paying attention and I'm speaking with her and and I'm listening, she has dry diapers and
Speaker 0
Yep. Absolutely.
Speaker 2
How that feedback loop is what that's doing for our relationship and for my own confidence as a mother and our relationship as friends, you know, and as as people who are getting to know each other. It's just it's so profound, the relationship that it has or or the the the foundation that it has given to us.
Speaker 0
I've heard that from every single parent.
Speaker 2
Yeah.
Speaker 0
It's been hundreds of thousands of parents that have helped learnies. You know? Every single one of them has mentioned that as something that's been a huge benefit. Yeah. I don't have to change poopy diapers or, yeah, this or that or, you know, my kid went back to preschool, but we still trained by eighteen months because we'd still did it at home. Like, you can do it around day care. You don't have to do it full time.
Speaker 2
Mhmm.
Speaker 0
All the feedback, though, it all comes down to there is another layer of connection. It's not better or worse than any other way of parenting, but it probably is gonna enhance your connection and make
Speaker 2
you I mean, I would say it's better. I would say it's better.
Speaker 0
But, you know, people get pissed off at me when
Speaker 2
you Yeah. Well, this is not the podcast to listen to.
Speaker 0
I know. Your your audience will be like, oh, oh, yeah. Okay. So So I can also curse. Get to yeah. So no. So may I add something too to your observation days? Just as something that, so there's an observation log on my website at good everfree dot com forward slash observation dash log, and it's free, and you can download it. And so what I recommend doing so what you did is, awesome. And it's it's great. It's clock timing, and you're you're going off of and then you're adjusting the intervals. So that is one way to do it. Another way to do it is to go from waking up or from a feeding. Just pick one event, and then you will time and see how often they wet or soil themselves, and then find a rhythm. Right. And this is really after the first few weeks. So it's it's great that you did it when you did it because in the first few weeks, everything's crazy. There's no pattern to
Speaker 2
Yeah.
Speaker 0
Eating. There's no pattern to anything. You're all just, like, riding on your high of just having a baby and and you're trying to recover in most cases. And when is a couple weeks have passed? So during this time, you could just do observation and sound associations.
Speaker 2
Mhmm.
Speaker 0
Go along with them when they're doing it. Maybe you catch something cool. That's great. Bonus points. After a couple of weeks, you can do an observation session for a couple of hours or even for a couple of days and lock down and do it and see how often are their intervals after waking or feeding. And you will see a distinct pattern come out. I have a whole series of mini courses, and one of them is potty time mastery because you don't know when your baby needs to go, and my baby doesn't signal. And let me tell everybody listening. If your baby never signals and you've tried EC and you feel like you're a failure because your baby never signaled, there are three other ways to do EC. You don't have to just get signals from your baby. There are many reasons why some babies don't signal. And most of the time, it's us being too distracted in today's culture where we don't pick up on signals. But oftentimes, babies just won't signal. They'll stop signaling. They're on the other developmental tasks. Yeah.
Speaker 2
That's okay. I did wanna bring that up. This is
Speaker 0
an important one.
Speaker 2
Yeah. For sure does not signal when she needs to pee most of the time. That's fine. The only way that I've figured out how to catch them is to be proactively offering her. Right. Because she'll just look me in the face and pee with no signal or, you know, with pooping it's different. It's completely different. But, we could just well, it's not because she's even pre signaling. It's just it's just obvious and I pay for it.
Speaker 0
You see the signs.
Speaker 2
You
Speaker 0
see the signs. The sign is a little different from a signal, but it's still
Speaker 2
helpful. Exactly.
Speaker 0
You're paying attention and you're like, wait, she just got quiet and still, what is going on?
Speaker 2
Right. And so I did get a little confused about that with, after reading the diaper free babies or, again, didn't read it after learning about it from my husband. But I did confused to get confused because I I felt like EC kinda got painted like you're going off of your baby's signals. But I did notice signals when she was younger, but somewhere around three, four, five months, I was like, oh,
Speaker 0
you Exactly. Four twenty
Speaker 2
on the floor.
Speaker 0
Fourth trimester, you have clear signals. You have
Speaker 2
a
Speaker 0
child who is very fetal still, very creature like, just coming into their body and coming into the surroundings and sight and smell. Okay. So you have clear set. Let's move into Okay. Yeah. And just to finalize the newborn section, that's why it's so great to start as a newborn too. So you set patterns as a parent where you're gonna be committed to it more than even if they're going to daycare in a few months. Who cares? I don't care. Start it, get that connection, learn about your baby. It will help. And then and know that they signal much more clearly at those first three months. Then we move into mobile babies. They're rolling over. They're starting to crawl. They're starting to sit up. Some of them are starting to walk. So we're looking at, like, three to twelve months. During this time, there's so much happening developmentally. And if you're into wonder weeks, you know, there's leaps that are happening. If you're into whatever Montessori teaches the different stages and every, There are different developmental tests, and there's teeth coming in, and there's also, food changes, and they're starting to eat solids. So much is changing, and maybe they're starting to sleep through the night, I hope, for you, some of you. I feel like if you want that, please. It's possible. It's great. You know, there are so many changes that, of course, signals will go out this the window and think about it for a second. If we were in an intact culture where we are wearing very little clothing probably, we are able to go out, we're in a mud hut, You're crawling. You can go out to go pee and poop where everybody else does. You're done with potty learning. Done. You've been shooed out of the house a couple of times when you peed on the kitchen floor. You're done, and now you're going out where everybody else goes. Your EC days are over. Everything's done. I went to Ghana, West Africa when I was, nineteen. Also, had no idea what's going on, but I knew there were no diapers. I remembered that. There was a crazy man in his seventies wearing a diaper, and he was the only one.
Speaker 2
Woah.
Speaker 0
And, and everybody loved him. And the babies didn't have diapers. So what did they do? Well, when they started crawling, they went out to where everybody else went. Wow. So you think about it. You're in the modern day. You've got carpet probably. You've got clothing to work with. Your baby's just gonna go in their diaper usually, or if they're naked, they're just gonna go on the floor and they're gonna crawl on. Why would they bother to tell you when instinctively for hundreds of thousands of years, they haven't had to told tell anybody after around five or six months? They don't have to tell anybody because they can do it themselves. So, of course, they're gonna stop signaling. And, also, it's too much is going on. They're gonna stop signaling. So EC is, the problem with the other books that I found and the reason I wrote my book also is because it wasn't really comprehensive. What if your baby does a signal? What do you do then? On the mobile baby section, or part of life, a lot of people start at that stage, and I encourage you to if you've got a mobile baby. It's just you have to tweak things a little bit. So when you're observing, you might wanna use like, I have training pants that you can see the turquoise ones, you can really see when they're wet. You can do observation with training pant on your mobile baby. You can do it with a diaper belt with a cloth diaper in the middle of it. It's like a sumo style. You can do observation naked and just have to clean it all up, which is fine, but you have to modify that. You might use words instead of or you might use a mini potty instead of holding them in arms. There's a lot of things that change. They're all thoroughly covered in my book. But, basically, you are gonna go off I call them the four roads to potty time. So there are four ways to know when your baby needs to pee. One of them is a signal or a sign. You see them bear down or maybe they're blowing raspberries because they're trying to make that noise that you make. They're going. Some babies will do that before they need to go. Some babies will just grab their their crotch area or their bottom. A lot of them will fart, whether it's pee or poop. So there's signals, lots of them. I have them all listed out from all over the world. Everybody reports back. These are my baby signals. So those are one way. Another way is transition times. So I was calling those the easy catches, but also, like, transition time. We're about to get in the car. Of course, I'm a potty my baby first.
Speaker 2
Right.
Speaker 0
We're gonna get in the car. When I get to the store, I'm gonna potty my baby upon arrival. When my baby gets out of the bouncy thing, I'm gonna potty my baby then. Or when my baby gets fussy after being in the bouncy thing, but potty them then. You know? So there's different times. When is a transition between one event and another or between being in a baby carrier? Oh my gosh. If you're baby wearing and then you take your baby out, please potty your baby because they're probably gonna be holding it the whole time and they need to go. So with a mobile baby, you could do a lot of different other things. It's really exciting time to start. And, with the you know, I I I guess that's about it, really, for the mobile babies. And then you have the young toddlers, the twelve to eighteen months. If you want me to move into that, I can.
Speaker 2
Yeah. Because I'm curious about when how the the actual toilet comes into play and how, I feel like like we were talking about before recording that, like, my baby is almost eleven months. She's crawling and pulling up but not walking, but, you know, getting attitude. And she clearly will need to pee or poop sometimes, and I'm still holding her over the sink. Sometimes the toilet, well, toilet is poop, but I still hold her over the sink for peeing. And she'll be like bucking and trying to resist and get out of my arms, but I know that she has to go to the bathroom, and I'm wondering what are other options.
Speaker 0
And that is a great sign. So, oftentimes, babies will go into something called a potty pause. At this time, it's because they want more independence.
Speaker 2
Right. That's what I'm feeling too.
Speaker 0
Like, I wanna do it myself, but you don't really have
Speaker 2
Right.
Speaker 0
Skill to do it yourself yet, and it's gonna be a disaster, which with a lot of things.
Speaker 2
Yeah. That's that's life. Yeah.
Speaker 0
It's life. So okay. So with the mobile babies by the way, the other two ways to know your baby needs to pee, one of them is natural timing, not clock timing. Your baby's natural rhythm after waking and eating. Observation at any age is super helpful. You can learn your baby's unique rhythms. Okay? The fourth one is intuition. She can't possibly need to go again. Oh, he just went five minutes ago. He can't possibly need to go again. That's actually intuition. That means you actually you're cooking and you're going, oh my gosh. Poop. Poop. Why am I thinking about the baby poop? Yeah.
Speaker 2
It's a
Speaker 0
big piece of poop. So you gotta learn how to trust that intuition just like with birthing. You learn how to trust your intuition. This also has been taken from us over many thousands of years. We can reclaim our intuition by doing EC, and it really helps us to tune in.
Speaker 2
Oh my god. And it's the coolest thing because it it obviously connects to everything else. But going back to the the conversation about the confidence building, like, same with my partner as well, just the exactly like you said, like, all of a sudden, it will just it will just occur to me out of nowhere that she has to poop or pee Exactly. Or in the middle of the night or or whatever or when we're driving. Yeah. Yeah. That's what I I I have not had dreams about it, but I just spoke with a woman who I hope to have on here who, she co sleeps and and dreams when her baby has to pee and she wakes up and she pees her baby.
Speaker 0
I do too.
Speaker 2
Oh my god. That is so awesome.
Speaker 0
Even if they're in the room. I, so I co sleep for the first few months now, and then I put them in their own crib because I sleep better. They sleep we we just have modified what I used to be, like, I was really committed to I was only AP attachment parenting with my first, and I wore myself out. Right. So, you know, I'm finding balance. With that, I'll wake up in the middle of the night and dream about them needing to pee in their other room. And sure enough, within thirty seconds, they're awake. I can hear them on the monitor. I go get them, potty them, put them back to sleep. By the way, I would only do nighttime EC if it helps everyone get more sleep because there are times when you won't do it and there are times when you will do it. When it helps, fourth trimester, when it doesn't help, that whole middle part. And then babies can be dry all night by fourteen months. Some of them never till three. I really depends. So just for anybody wondering.
Speaker 2
Totally. And I I have been in I don't do EC at night. I just okay. I'm gonna be real. I don't care enough. I'm sleeping. She's sleeping.
Speaker 0
I'm not doing prioritizing sleep. Yeah. You care. You care about sleep. And sleep for is way more precious, let me tell you. Oh my god. Yeah. In the middle of the night. And I'm a
Speaker 2
I'm a rested postpartum mother, I have to say.
Speaker 0
See? That's great. Yeah. But it's I've done it both ways. No. There's no right way. There's no
Speaker 2
wrong way. Know it'll be with another kid, so I'm living with this one. But so, but but because we do so much of the, e seeing and we do it, you know, upon her real wake in the morning, I have been so fascinated the last couple of months how I can tell that sometimes it's dry diapers when she wakes up, sometimes it's just one one pee. You know, you just tell by the weight of it or whatever, but and then when I go potty her, how much pee comes out and that she'll wake up and play with me, and then get a little irritable. And I'm like, oh, right. Shit. Sorry. And then I go, yeah. And I go take her and so much freaking pee will come out. And I'm like, you are the smartest thing that you
Speaker 0
It's like a puppy it's like a puppy being in a crate all night. It's like a puppy being in a crate. You let them out and they go the forever pee. It's just
Speaker 2
Right. And it and that was another thing is just how how proud you feel of your baby and how smart you see that they are. You know, it's it's so important for your whole blueprint of mothering to feel that way about your child.
Speaker 0
The success too. The pride, the connection, the success, all of that. That is so important, and you're really helping them. Even if you suck at easy, it doesn't matter. You're still You're doing something. Effort, and I commend you. You're like, it doesn't have to be perfect.
Speaker 2
Okay. So older child. So so twelve months on.
Speaker 0
Twelve months to eighteen months. So you wanna start and finish during this period. And I have made the mistake with my third of leaving him in diapers till seventeen months during the day even though he wasn't pooping in them pretty much his whole life, but I left him in them for the sake of day care. Mhmm. If your child is poop trained, you can send them to day care or preschool in whatever backup you choose because you're paying the bill. Sorry. You can determine you you basically say, I'm sending them in this backup. This is their rhythm. This is their routine. These are transition times that are good. I have a blog post about this. It actually has a whole download that you can use and give to your preschool day care provider. But during twelve to eighteen months, it's gonna be an issue if you if you work or if you need time off and you have them in a social setting. It's gonna be something that you're gonna oh, I don't I can't do EC because I have to do this. No. No. You stick with it at home and on the weekends and nights and in the mornings, and they'll still get it. But twelve to eighteen months so if they're poop trained, you can send them in cloth pull up, which I have some of those, and I have the training pants. It's important to try to stay consistent with your backup between home and away. But, anyway, that's I digress. That's just my biggest the biggest problem with people who have children in this age range, and it's why people fall off the wagon completely. They're cloth diapering, and then they start using disposables twelve to eighteen months because they just are worn out. I get it. What you need to know is that during this time is the sensitive period with the Montessori school of thought. They have all these different sensitive periods for different things. It is amazing how sponge like they are at this stage for the potty learning task. They wanna do the whole thing, and they wanna do it themselves. They will resist if you're doing too much of it. They will follow your lead. If you get lazy at this point and you just fall back on diapers instead of taking them away at this stage, they're gonna follow suit, and they're gonna be like, well, this is a lot easier for me. I'll just go in this thing, and then you will end up potty training a three year old because you'll have lost connection. So what
Speaker 2
if in your opinion, what time frame and, of course, different for every baby and blah blah blah. But what point if you're doing, like, take me for example, I feel like you have a pretty good idea of how how it is for us right now. Should I be moving her out of diapers?
Speaker 0
Not until she starts walking. So Oh, okay. Very big developmental task. Now I took my nine when when my first was nine months old, I took him out of diapers because he started walking. Wow. And at that point, it is not developmentally appropriate to lay a baby down and change them lying down, their clothing or their diapers, if they're already walking. Even if they're pulling up, they're gonna prefer to be standing up. And you wanna honor that. Some people don't, but I do. You wanna do changes standing up. Well, I found it to be such a struggle to change his diaper at that Yeah. That I I was just like, screw this. So I I put training pants on them and they fell right off, which is, again, the impetus for starting
Speaker 2
Right.
Speaker 0
Right. Right. Years later. But I really was over it. I was over the struggle. I didn't wanna battle my son. I also really wanted to support his learning. So we upped the ante. I even did a little mini potty training session with him at thirteen months to get him to go to the potty every time. It's just the best time for learning. It's awesome. For your situation, eleven months old, pulling up to standing, but not really walking yet. Once she has mastered walking, she's gonna be available mentally to really focus on completion with this task. So you're gonna wanna take her out of daytime diapers. She's waking up dry. Nighttime follows daytime organically anyway. Even if you don't lift a finger nighttime, you're going to have success. It's fine. Focus on daytime. So for daytime excluding naps, you can have her diaper free, but not naked, unless naked works. So if naked all the time, you don't have pee all over the floor all the time, great. If you've got pee all over the floor, whenever, wherever, that's that. Like, you know, and you're gonna be stressed out and you're gonna be like and everybody's gonna judge you and you're gonna feel stupid. So it doesn't feel right. You wanna use the backup that works the best for whatever wherever you're at. I have a whole blog post on backups. It's awesome. It tells you exactly what I've done with all my babies and what other people
Speaker 2
have done. So you are pretty much keeping your babes in diapers until they've mastered walking, and that's the developmental transition to get out of daytime diapers Yes. And give them that authority to, like, paint me a picture of okay. So so your baby or or my baby, whatever, has mastered walking and they're in their little cute backups and what happens? Like, are they walking into the bathroom where their toilet is? Is it a baby toilet or are they needing help to get up on the toilet? Like, paint me a picture of what that looks like.
Speaker 0
With backups and with receptacles and with the location of the potty, everything is pliable and flexible, whatever works the best. For some time, you might have to potty outside, and that's the only place she'll go. If that's the case, then you do that for a little while. Sure. What you're what day in and day out, you're gonna be focused on the easy catches like always. You know, the wake up pee. Sometimes at that age, all I can get is the wake up pee because the rest of the time, they're focused on other things. The wake up pee feels successful. I'm committed to it. It's great. The poops easy. Yeah. It's easy. And the poops generally are easy as well.
Speaker 2
And carrying her or him with that wake up pee with a a twelve month and over, they've mastered walking. What does that hold look like?
Speaker 0
So for so for this age, I would have them I would definitely transition as they start to walk. I would transition from in arms holds to, unless they're, like, fussy or sleep or tired or you're in public and you need to hold them over the toilet, to really teach them how to mount the potty. I have a new mini potty coming out, a little one that they that is really good for twelve to eighteen months because they don't make them anymore. But they want they need to be able to have success with mounting the potty. So you can teach them or you can, have a a slightly older kid teach them. We wanna teach them how to get on the potty themselves. So a fake
Speaker 2
one, not the one that adults are using?
Speaker 0
It's it's a good feature for a for a child. Yeah. For a
Speaker 2
child. So it's on the floor maybe, like, near the bigger toilet.
Speaker 0
Now, however, if you have escapee problems because they run off and they haven't finished pooping or whatever, you're gonna want to, contain them by using a toilet seat reducer on the big toilet. So, again, it really just depends.
Speaker 2
Yeah.
Speaker 0
This is why my book comes with support because Right. There are so many variables. It's impossible to cover them all. But we have, like, a really good community of and I have coaches and myself. We all help each other, like, troubleshoot. Everything is figureoutable. You could figure out anything. But you're gonna have a toilet seat reducer or the mini potty.
Speaker 2
Okay.
Speaker 0
And you're really gonna wanna transition to all of that and get rid of daytime diapers as soon after walking as you feel it's right, like, that intuition. And then your job from twelve to eighteen months, this is while long, short term and long term mostly long term repetitive memory is is able to be stored in the brain. So you've got children who are able to start singing songs and doing repetitive things. Same thing with the routine. So you do the same routine every single time. I have a board book called tiny potty that explains the routine and does not focus on, am I ready to be out of diapers and all that crap? And it's a unisex kind of a genderless. It's a it's the whole routine. The point of that book is to show the routine to this child over and over and over again. It's a kisser. And it's, like, it's for six months and up. Cute. Just like my undies and everything, six months and up. So you wanna you wanna really reinforce the routine, have them do as much of it themselves as possible, even pretend to wipe and put the toilet paper in, flush, turn on the lights, washer has everything, all parts of the routine. And you wanna really focus on teaching what you Intuit are the things that are missing. I wanna do it myself, help them do it themselves. Twelve to eighteen months is sort of the long stretch of teaching them that, handing the baton. This is their their keys to the castle. Here you go. This this period is all about teaching. It's all about having the appropriate backups. It's about paying attention. If they're in daycare or preschool, it's about, poop training them at home Yeah. And teaching them the language that they need or the if they can point if they can tell you that they're hungry, they can tell you that they
Speaker 2
need Totally. Yeah.
Speaker 0
And they don't have to do that with words. So you you wanna really get to know them, educate your caregivers, and really focus on wrap up. Sometimes it lingers until twenty months. If it gets longer than twenty four months, you wrap it up with a potty training experience. You're not doing EC anymore. We're potty training. We're done, and you can use my other book for that. A lot of people have a good experience with both of them. They use one for this period and one for that period. But what you wanna do with EC is it's not child that your child did not choose to get into diapers.
Speaker 2
Right. Right.
Speaker 0
Does not get to choose when to get out of diapers. There is no child who's gonna say I'm ready to get out of diapers. Right. It it's not it doesn't make any sense. It's a it's a it's a marketing message. You get to choose, and these are the tools to do it. And in my book, I have all of the building blocks to potty independence. It's very just it's so you wanna you wanna know pride. You already experience it. But when they are, like, doing it just to give you an example, my daughter, who's five now, thirteen months, I took her out of okay. So I did half ass. I did almost no AC, like, two months to eight months. And then I was like, honey, crap. We're doing terribly. Right. I'm half on track with her. Got her in the cloth diapers. Thirteen months, she was telling me every time, and I took her out of diapers. No. Thirteen months, I took her out of diapers. Fifteen months, she was telling me every single time. She did not have any accidents from fifteen months on.
Speaker 2
Wow.
Speaker 0
Amazing. And preschool, nonissue. They How
Speaker 2
was she telling you?
Speaker 0
She'd say the word pee pee.
Speaker 2
Oh, okay. Cool.
Speaker 0
So it's and it it's it's amazing. Like, my twenty two month old will grab his butt and look at me. So every he doesn't talk as much. So every every child has this capability. It's amazing. Beautiful. So twelve to eighteen months, you're gonna start and finish. And that's it. And you, when when your child starts to walk and has really finished gotten over that hump, their brain is now freed up. You're gonna start to hand the baton off. Mhmm. And that's what you see it as. It's on the job training. You're teaching them just like you teach them how to tie their shoes someday or ride a bike or teach the ABCs. And it's gonna come out all backwards and sideways at first, a b l m n o t
Speaker 2
Right.
Speaker 0
And then they'll get it. Mhmm. You just have to sort of stick with it. The diaper from zero months to eighteen months is always a backup even when you're not really great at ECV.
Speaker 2
Mhmm.
Speaker 0
It is not a toilet. That's the main point. Think about it. Yeah. And so would you
Speaker 2
would you recommend with, like, my situation of putting her little baby thing in the bathroom where she could crawl to it and then putting her on it instead of still holding over the sink?
Speaker 0
Yeah. You can absolutely start transitioning with that right now. And some people will do a thing where they crawl to it and they touch it.
Speaker 2
Mhmm.
Speaker 0
I heard that. This training where they're teaching them to touch the sink. So cute. And you know what? All of mine have, like, banged on the door to go outside or banged on the bathroom door at a very young age. So it's just possible to use that. Yeah.
Speaker 2
And and it's been fun. And now that she's doing it in the toilet, you know, it's just to to see the things come online. Like, she watches it. She's curious about it. You know, we flush and say goodbye to it. It's it's all happening and she's, you know, ten months. And so, yeah, I think that sound that feels right because she's definitely trying to get out of my arms a lot. So I think I'll try sitting her on her little so that she can take her time. Because sometimes it takes so long. I'm like, my fucking arm is must is like spassing me up. Like, I can't keep hold of you, dude. You are massive.
Speaker 0
Just stop doing it then. And you know, you wanna close the door and lock it, and you're in there with them. And oftentimes, this is the biggest tip I could give everybody listening. If your baby is, like, resisting and wanting to jump off the toilet or whatever, pretend like you're doing something else, like you're picking your your, your pluck your eyebrows or do something, like, really intensely focus on something else.
Speaker 2
Mhmm.
Speaker 0
It gives them privacy without you having to leave the room. And then nine times out of ten, they'll just go while your back is turned.
Speaker 2
It's really cool.
Speaker 0
Love it. They want that. They want privacy. They're they're just great.
Speaker 2
Yeah. Fair enough. Okay. So, yeah. So, I mean, you know, you've said it throughout the the episode, but but just for for to wrap it up, how and where can everyone reach you? And if you wanna speak a little bit to the community support, that just sounds so interesting and cool. So give us a little wrap up of how people can find you.
Speaker 0
Absolutely. You can find me at go diaper free dot com, and you can find the easy start guide to the free guide that shows, like, a little synopsis of things. It's a one pager. It's super low commitment, and and often people can start just from this. It's at go diaper free dot com forward slash start. Very easy. I have a blog. I have a podcast that in twenty nineteen is getting a whole overhaul. Got a YouTube channel. I've got tons of really awesome free resources. Then I also have my book, which comes with a private video library, an audiobook, a digital version. You can get a paperback version too, and it's got, the video library is just amazing. Nice. And then and then you've got access to this private community, and, it's run by my coaches who have trained myself. You can find other parents across the world who we all have read the same book. We're all giving each other the same similar advice. It is the most supportive, amazing, kind community. We have never had an issue in our community. It's beautiful, and everybody's really willing to support and very vocal and active. So that comes with the book as well. And then I also have my potty training book on there, and I also have two board books, one for daytime, one for nighttime. And then then seven mini courses, one on starting at birth, one on outings. All the major issue areas, I've covered because I I just get tired of answering the questions all right in a minute, like, one thing. I need to do that. Lots of different things. Yeah. It's really helpful. So and and and, again, you can also learn EC from my website without buying a thing. But if you need extra hand holding, I'm totally there, and I've got all of these resources because when I first started, I couldn't figure out a lot of this stuff. Sure. You wanna talk about demystifying and making you feel really competent at this? My book would be the best resource
Speaker 2
for me. Nice.
Speaker 0
And in twenty nineteen, I'm gonna do a full on course with a lot more support and a lot more, like, hand holding and stuff. And, you know, if you're part of any of my email list, you'll know about that. And then tiny undies dot com. So you're not gonna find things that fit. I have all the things over there, and they're really cute. And they're totally gender neutral and, like, wholesome. So Awesome.
Speaker 2
Yeah. I gotta check that website out. Yeah. Awesome. Well, thank you. I think this is we we accomplished our goal. I think to give people the the confidence and and the tools to start it up, and, and, yeah, I hope you guys will reach out to us and let us know how it's going. And please find Andrea on her website and so many free wonderful website or resources. And, yeah, thank you for your time.
Speaker 0
Yeah. You're so welcome. Yeah. I'm excited to hear everybody's stories. Thanks for having me.
Speaker 2
Alright. Take care. You too. That's it for today, everyone. Join us next week for another episode of the free birth podcast. Thanks for joining us, and remember, your body, your choice. Lots of love.
