On the fourth Monday of the month, I’ll be blogging about the topic for this month’s DiaperFreeBaby meeting. This month, the topic is memorable EC moments.
I guess it goes without saying that after three years of pottying a baby/toddler everywhere we go, I have a lot of memorable moments. Most of them happened in the first year or two–after a certain point, people stop being impressed (or shocked, or whatever) when your kid uses the toilet. And oddly enough, most of my EC memories are of successes. I really don’t think this has anything to do with how good my daughter and I were at EC. I think it has to do with the fact that I’m an overly confident person in general, which means I tend to play successes over and over in my head and forget embarrassing moments as quickly as possible. Also, I used backup most of the time. (For anybody not acquainted with EC lingo: backup = diapers. Diaper tend to make EC misses a lot less, er, memorable.)
But hey, nothing wrong with remembering success, right? One of my absolute favorites was when I gave my first cloth diaper workshop. Ostensibly this was to teach people about cloth diapers, but really I was just using the lure of cloth diapers to tell people about EC. I was super-excited about this new skill I was learning, and I was about to apply to become a DiaperFreeBaby Mentor and start a local group, so I wanted to drum up some local interest in this crazy EC idea. So when my daughter was about three months old, I organized a cloth diaper party, complete with diapers for sale. I went through the presentation on different types of cloth diapers and how to use them. Then I segued into my main point: how EC makes cloth diapering so much easier and more fun.
“How do you do elimination communication?” I asked my audience. “Like this.” I put my Baby Bjorn Little Potty on the table (this was in a meeting room in a restaurant, by the way–it was a private room though! But in retrospect I still can’t believe I did that) and talked about timing and signals as I casually pulled my daughter’s diaper off (checking surreptitiously to see if it was dry–it was. Which meant she was bound to pee soon). Then I demonstrated the classic EC hold over the potty and cued my daughter. She peed instantly.
A gasp of amazement went around the room. You could have heard a pin drop. I felt like the coolest EC’er in the world. Our joint demonstration of EC techniques could not have been more perfect.
Of course, she never did anything like that again. Probably just as well. Peeing really shouldn’t be an exhibition, you know? But it’s okay. She was only three months old at the time. She’ll never remember it.
I, on the other hand, will remember it forever. Unlike the time when she pooped on my mother-in-law’s door mat, which I’m trying hard to forget. You don’t want to hear about that story, do you? No. Of course you don’t.