sv evi

About our 2nd week in Fiji, Zak came by and extolled the virtues of EC on a boat. He said after a week, he & his wife didn’t have to wash any more poppy nappies. Riki looked at me and said, “babe, if you do that for a week, I’ll do everything else–cooking, washing dishes, feeding Wade, etc. ”. Riki was the main poppy diaper washer in the family. 🙂

I had first heard of EC at a party when I was pregnant, and the person talking to me about it was quite zealous–I thought, that sounds crazy.

But my stepsister had given me a book about it, which I brought to Guava, always thinking that perhaps on the boat I’d have time and space to try it out. Zak motivated me, and I pulled the book out and read a few pages about how to start EC in middle infancy. The book talked about how you could do it full-time, part-time, or occasionally. And that it shouldn’t be stressful, it was about the process of communicating with your child. I was really excited to try it out, and began the next morning. I thought we’d start with trying to have Wade poo in the potty, since it’s pretty obvious when he has to go poop.

Basically EC works by using a cue sound. Whenever he goes pee, we make a  “pass” sound, and we do some grunting while signing the ASL sign for potty when he goes poo. We started with some diaper free time in the cockpit, and when he peed, i would make the sound. At first we didn’t have a potty for him, so when he made the poop face, I would swoop him up naked, rush through the boat to our toilet, and hold him on there while grunting. Now we have a small potty in the cockpit, so it’s much easier.

It’s amazing how quickly he learned to use the potty, and we are such proud parents! Since we began about 3 weeks ago, we’ve only had two poos in diapers. And he often goes pee in the potty; we just sit him on it after he wakes up from a nap, or after he nurses, or when we think of it, or when we are changing his diaper anyways, and he goes! We still use diapers, but I’m thinking about trying to step it up a little and perhaps move towards just the cloth diaper without the cover inside of a pair of shorts. We’ll see. It’s hot here, so the more time he can be without a hot diaper on, the better.