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I was recommended the book Diaper Free: The Gentle Wisdom of Natural Infant Hygiene (Ingrid Bauer) by a number of parents on an email list in which I participate. At first the idea of Natural Infant Hygiene (NIH), or Elimincation Communication (EC) as it is often called, totally grossed me out - after all, aren’t babies and diapers part and parcel?

I figured it couldn’t hurt to read the book and maybe it would give me some interesting things to try with Gwen, so I picked it up from my library and dove into it. People, I love this book!

The idea behind NIH is that babies are born with the ability to consciously relax their bodies and urinate or defecate just like an older child or adult, but that we train them to use a diaper instead. From pages 98-99:

“Elimination Communication begins with the baby’s awareness of subtle sensations, which indicate the filling of the bladder. The baby may then signal the parent, or the parent may anticipate the need through timing or intuition. The parent holds the child over a receptacle and make a familiar sound. The child then voluntarily relaxes and releases the urine before the bladder has become uncomfortably full. Over time, as muscles strengthen and conscious control increases, the baby is able to retain and hold in larger quantities of urine for longer periods of time if necessary. This occurs gradually with no particular focus or effort as a natural and inevitable consequence. About the time the sphincter muscles fully develop, the diaper-free baby achieves consistent continence.”

Bauer then goes on to contrast this with conventional potty training, in which a child has learned to pee in its diaper only when the bladder is very full and it cannot hold any more urine. When we then ask that child to begin using a toilet or potty to urinate in, he or she must contract the sphincter muscles and make it to the potty or toilet to release the urine. These kids just literally don’t sense the subtler signals that their bladder is sending to their brain in order to pee voluntarily before the bladder is full until much later than the toilet learning has begun.

I think one of the most interesting things I learned in this book is about the differences between the Western world’s concept of ‘toilet readiness’ - that a child cannot possibly toilet train before at least 18 months because they don’t have the ability - and the Eastern world’s belief that children are quite able to communicate effectively about their elimination needs. I enjoyed this quote a whole lot - from pages 70-71:

“One of the most glaring problems with the concept of toilet training readiness is its heavy ethnocentric focus. The “readiness” theory can only even begin to be considered viable if one pretends that the vast majority of the non-Western world does not exist … Millions of mothers around the globe know that babies are “ready” and aware from birth. The empirical evidence is overwhelming and stretches back for eons. Why has the experience of the majority of the world’s mothers and babies been ignored for so long? Are only modern North American and European babies subject to this maturational lag?”

The book then describes the suspicious timing of the release of scientific literature to promote the ‘toilet readiness’ theory by Dr. Brazelton during the year the first disposable diapers - Pampers - were released. Not to mention that Dr. Brazelton happened to sit for a time on the Pampers Parenting Institute Pediatric Roundtable. Coincidence? I happen to think not!

The book is filled with stories and instructions as to how best support your child’s elimination - whether you start at birth, after a few months, or start later with a toddler. I’m planning to start pretty early with Love Bug - we’ll see how it goes!

Here are some other resources for learning about NIH:

• borntopotty.com
• diaperfreebaby.org
• tribalbaby.org - Learn about Elimination Communication
• Free to EC! My Journey to Elimination Communication

Yesterday, I woke up to some very strong Braxton-Hicks contractions. So strong that I was tempted to stay home from a planned outing to Ottawa Street with a good friend to pick up fabrics to make some slings. I ended up going anyways and although I continued to have decent runs of contractions and some intense cervical pain (what on earth was Love Bug doing in there??), there was nothing that was coming with any regularity.

I continued to have strong ones all through the afternoon and evening and Brad and I were pretty sure that Love Bug would be making his/her arrival last night or early on Valentine’s Day - how perfect would that have been? We decided to head up to bed around 10:30 (early for us, believe it or not) and get some rest in case that was it. I fell asleep around 11:30 or 12, wonderfully, but was awake at 1AM with a big contraction. As I laid in the dark and breathed through it, I thought for sure I was in labour. I timed 4 contractions at exactly 5 minutes apart and lasting around 45 seconds apiece which were quite strong and definitely tightening down across my belly and into my back when Gwen woke up.

After trying to put her on the potty and attempting to settle her, the contractions spaced out - between 7 and 13 minutes apart. They picked back up again for a time, but were inconsistent. At about 3:30AM, I was starving hungry, so I decided to go downstairs, have a snack, and call my midwife to get some advice on what to do. Once I got downstairs, the contractions all but stopped. I had an apple and a hunk of cheese, cleaned up my camera’s memory card (fresh memory for Love Bug’s arrival!), and did a bit of web surfing. Since I had only 3 contractions in 45 minutes and they were very short, I decided not to call the midwife and to go back up to bed. I was asleep by about 4:30AM and Brad was wonderful enough to get me some extra sleep in the morning - 10:20AM! - it was fantastic and well needed.

I have had a few decent contractions today, but definitely nothing to get worked up about. I guess we’ll see!

I had my 37 week appointment on Monday and discussed the GBS thing with my primary midwife. She was very supportive of our decision to not use antibiotics and to decline the 4- and 12-hour blood tests and to treat on risk factors. THANK GOODNESS. I feel so much better about things now! And we did end up getting the antibiotic prescription filled, so we have it just in case.

Baby had a nice acceleration in heartrate while we were listening (the student had just palpated positioning and gotten Love Bug all riled up) into the 160’s, but it settled back down into the 140’s/150’s after a minute or two. My primary midwife’s guess is: girl, in the high 7-lb range, born at 39 weeks - which is the 18th/19th … same as my secondary midwife’s guess for timing! We’ll see!

Love Bug’s movements have definitely slowed down some in the past few days. He/she is still moving a lot in the evenings, but the movements are both stronger and slower. I’ve read that the baby often starts moving a little less due to lack of space and conserving energy, but who knows! I’m definitely not concerned about the amount of movement anyways - plenty of kicks and punches and hiccups going on in there!

I recently borrowed Ingrid Bauer’s Diaper Free from my local library and was inspired, after a number of days of Gwen refusing to go near the potty, to just take off her diaper and let her run around. I know that she’s able to get herself on and off the potty just fine and I know that when she has to go, she tells me (ie. when she’s naked after a bath or after a diaper change), so I figured, “Why not?”

The first day, she pooped on the ground once. The rest of the day, she’d exclaim “Pee!” and run to the potty to relieve herself.

The second day, she took herself to the potty every time throughout the day. We even went to a friend’s house and she told me she had to pee while we were there (I had put her in a pair of training pants to go out in). She even woke up from her nap dry.

Today, the third day, we had a few misses - she once peed on the floor right in front of the potty (she was wearing a skirt and I don’t think she could figure out how to sit down without sitting on it!), and she peed once on me (I was giving her a sip of my tea … warm in, warm out?).

I think, though, that the miss that will go down in history is this one: Brad took Gwen up to the bathroom with him and she was playing with some toys. He looked up as she kinda made a grunting noise and asked if she needed to pee. She nodded, so Brad put her on the toilet to pee.

As she peed, she pointed and said, “Duck!”

Brad looked over at the duck and said, “Oh. Duck.”

Gwen giggled, put her hand on her head and said “Hat!”

“Yeah. Hat.” Brad said as he opened the door to call me up, explaining that Gwen had had a bit of an accident.

“Okaaaaaay … do you need my help?” I asked from the kitchen and headed to the stairs.

“Kinda. She pooed on her duck. And called it a hat.”

At that, I burst into laughter and tromped up the stairs. Sure enough, on the floor of the bathroom, her beloved duckie was wearing a poo hat. And Gwen was still giggling and pointing.

Man, I love my kid!

Man, that was so much more entertaining than changing a dirty diaper!

(We will forever be puzzled as to how, precisely, the poo got to be in that exact position.)

I think I just upped my crunchiness factor again!

While Dave and Lindsey (my brother-in-law and his girlfriend) were staying with us recently, Lindsey and I were discussing crafty projects we could make for Christmas presents. We discussed handkerchiefs, market bags, reusable vegetable bags for in the fridge, sandwich wraps, and snack bags.

We didn’t get around to any of it before Christmas … mostly because she was gone through November and December! (She was, however, still good enough to be crafty in her Christmas presents!)

When she arrived again in January, we happened to go on a trip to Ottawa Street - Hamilton’s fabric and antique district. While there, I purchased some cotton as well as some rip-stop nylon.

These things are easy and fun to make! I won’t even BEGIN to pretend that I’m a decent sewer - in fact, I would definitely consider myself to be a novice. So if you’re concerned you won’t be able to figure this out, I say you can!

The first thing I made was a reusable sandwich wrap. I did a bunch of research online and found that I liked Toward Sustainability’s Homemade Sandwich Wrap the best. However, I didn’t like the idea of plastic actually in contact with my food (after all, if I didn’t care about it, why would I bother making these?). I knew I had a couple of options for waterproof layers - vinyl (um … I don’t like to wrap my sandwiches in reproductive toxins, you?), PUL (not sure about how food-safe it is, and it wasn’t readily available), oilcloth (I’d love to use this stuff if it still exists!), and nylon. In order to keep the waterproof layer away from the food entirely, I decided to use two layers of cotton sandwiching (pardon the pun!) what I opted for - rip-stop nylon.

So I kinda followed the directions and kind of made it up. I quickly realized that I couldn’t just sew it closed and turn it inside out, since it was three layers and not two, so I ended up just folding over the edges of the three pieces of cloth, pinning them together and hemming them. Next time, I’m going to try the two cotton pieces with right sides facing, and then the nylon on top … I *think* that should work for turning it inside-out so that there’s no fraying fabric on the outside!

The second item I made was a reusable snack bag. I again researched a bunch of patterns and settled on the we wilsons’ Reusable Snack Bag Tutorial. I followed this one pretty much exactly, except I again sandwiched the nylon between two layers of cotton so that the food would be touching only cotton. It took a bit of finagling, but I figured it out - maybe the next one I make I’ll take pictures as I go!

The next set I made was much … nicer. As always happens with projects, I think, I knew what I was doing and what the problems might be (although I still hadn’t figured out that I can probably flip the wrap inside-out) and I made the snack bag much bigger - it’s about 6″ by 6″ total, I think. The plaid one is perfect for quick snacks for Gwen, but a bit impractical for adult-sized snacks.

This set was given to Lindsey for her birthday (and in the picture, you can see how the wrapped sandwich would sit).

I bought a bunch of material and am hoping to sew up a few more sandwich wraps and snack bags for Brad as well as some fun snack bags for Gwen and I to use on our outings - it’s MUCH easier to give her a snack bag to eat on the run than a container!

And in case you’re wondering, I’ve washed Brad’s sandwich wraps and snack bag just in my dish water and let them air dry. They both can often just be shaken free of crumbs and used again right away, but if they’re soiled (for example, by an egg salad sandwich!), the food comes right off the cotton with a little swish and wipe

Um, I’m full term.

Yep, that means I can go at any time.

Yep, that’s a bit crazy/exciting/nerve-wracking.

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This passage made me smile today as I found it over @ Peaceful Parenting - totally my new favourite blog. If this is what parenting is all about, BRING IT ON!

Manifesto of the idle parent

We reject the idea that parenting requires hard work
We pledge to leave our children alone
That should mean that they leave us alone, too
We reject the rampant consumerism that invades children from the moment they are born
We read them poetry and fantastic stories without morals
We drink alcohol without guilt
We reject the inner Puritan
We fill the house with music and laughter
We don’t waste money on family days out and holidays
We lie in bed for as long as possible
We try not to interfere
We push them into the garden and shut the door so that we can clean the house
We both work as little as possible, particularly when the kids are small
Time is more important than money
Happy mess is better than miserable tidiness
Down with school
We fill the house with music and merriment

Here is the recipe that my midwife office gives out for postpartum herbal baths.

Ingredients:

• 1 oz uva ursi
• 1 oz shepherd’s purse
• 4-6 cloves garlic, sliced or chopped

Instructions:

1. Put all ingredients in a pot with 4L of liquid.
2. Simmer for 20 minutes.
3. Add 1 cup sea salt to the mixture.
4. Let cool and strain into containers with lids, freeze if not used within 2 days. Makes enough for 2 baths.

I was lucky enough for my first birth to have a friend drop off some extra herbal bath that she made up for her homebirth in April before I had Gwen, so I didn’t have to make it! In the above picture, taken shortly after Gwen’s birth, we’re actually in the herbal bath together. It’s healing for both mom’s reproductive system and baby’s cord and is honestly SO SOOTHING. If you’ve got it frozen in containers, just thaw it in the tub while you’re filling it with water. This time, I’m hoping to make a double batch so that I can have a soothing bath more often!