"I'm not going to be one of THOSE parents!"

I'm not an extremist...really I'm not!

I was told by lots of my friends that I was being radical when I decided to cloth diaper my baby. Radical? Cloth diapers are practically as easy as disposables these days. You wash them twice a week and then stuff them, which takes about five minutes. The diapers attach like disposables and function even better, so while the term, "cloth diapering" might sound extreme, it truly isn't. I knew I'd use cloth diapers long before I had a baby's bum to wrap in them. But, when a few of my child-bearing friends started chatting about this fanatical new method of "Elimination Communication" I thought, "Well now, THAT'S extreme!"

"...and you put them over the toilet and make this pssspssspsss sound in their ear and they go PEE!"

It seemed ridiculous. In fact, it seemed militant. Imagine: a tinier that tiny baby being forced to pee on demand! These must be terrible parents! The sort of folks who brag about their kids knowing the alphabet at 14 months or train them to recite all 44 presidents by age 3. I knew that when I had kids I would not be one of those parents- by golly, my offspring would crap and tinkle in a diaper, just like all the other kids!

And then I remembered something.

I remembered being at a district border crossing in India. We got out of our car and waited while the uniformed men pretended to care about our paperwork. For the first time I processed something that I'd seen a gazillion times but never really thought about; a mother with her infant child, squatted close to the ground, held her baby out in front of her and the baby peed. I then realized, "I've been all over the world and have scarcely ever seen children in diapers."

So, after a few casual encounters with the term, "Elimination Communication" and seeing it in action primarily in a third world setting the concept seemed like something for parents who were either American extremists or, quite frankly, the world's extremely impoverished...either way it was just a little too extreme for me. The American-Raised Mandy couldn't mesh with the Well-Traveled Mandy on the matter quite yet. But, the more I heard about parents practicing this EC thing in the U.S. the more I was curious as to how it might be similar to what I'd seen abroad and I wasn't quite as quick to judge- after all if it's how the entire population of India does it, there's at least a billion kids who've survived the process!

Fast forward to a pregnant me. Remember that I live in a world where knowing about birth and babies is my livelihood. I make every attempt to cram my brain full of information on issues that might come up in a postpartum situation. I surround myself with people who know a ton more than I do about lots and lots of baby stuff so I can suck all the information from their massive brains. It was inevitable that some time during my pregnancy, one of these people would ask me, "By any chance, are you going to do EC?" Oh ya, that.

I ran it by one of my oldest friends, Kristina, I remembered her mentioning trying it a few times with her youngest daughter.

"Are you going to do it?" she asked

"Naa. It's so hard! I mean, it just seems like adding a lot of work when I'm already adjusting to being a parent." Shrug.

Now during my pregnancy I had it all...all-day sickness (I refuse to use the term, "morning sickness"...if only!), stretch marks, excessive swelling, and an overwhelming sense of being scared senseless. I was going to be a mother...oh dear God...I was going to be a MOTHER! I remember bawling my eyes out days before my daughter was born and blubbering to my husband, Griffin, "We've made a terrible mistake and we can't go back now! What if I don't love it? What if I'm bored by it? What if I'm not interested in being a mom- really being a mom?" And then on that fateful day, when I pulled her up from inside of me, it all changed- I mean everything was different. I went from being scared that I'd be bored to being thoroughly entertained by staring at this little person- waiting for her next move, a coo, a hand to clench, her eyes to open. I went from thinking she might not be "enough" to thinking that I could never be enough for her.

I wanted to see inside of her little mind, to know what she was thinking about. I wished she could talk to me because I wanted to know everything about her. And that is what lead me back onto the computer to research this EC thing.

My first stop was to a site called, Part Time Diaper Free. It encourages parents to shoot for one less diaper a week. I liked that. It made the process seem do-able. I started to understand that EC is not potty training at all, rather it's knowing when your baby has to empty and allowing them to do so without having a diaper on. I also realized that EC is not something you have to be bad-ass, hard-core about. You don't have to never use diapers, you can even do it if you work full time. This was appealing to me because I am going back to work soon and I typically work long, inconsistent hours. I'd imagined that my work hours would throw a kink into things, after all, I'd potty trained toddlers before and it requires a ton of consistency- EC is not potty training as we think of it. Someone on one of the sites explained typical potty training as parents teaching a child to "hold on" until a toilet is available. EC focuses more on training parents to know when their child needs to "release".

I liked the idea of learning from my baby, not just my baby learning from me.

The second inspiration came from a 19 minute online documentary called, Scout Go Pee Pee. I was immediately drawn in because the soundtrack to the movie primarily consisted of a mother singing her made-up songs . This is how I sing to my Fauna. So, right away I thought, "Well, this mom seems pretty normal. These families don't look like hippies or radicals, they look a lot like...us." Tie dye had been kept to a minimum.

As a doula and mother who is constantly seeking a view beyond the American way, I appreciated that several of the parents in the film were seemingly striving toward the same. One mom shares, "What's ironic is that the whole diapering thing is such a minority of the world...it's our culture applying what we feel is right- that everybody else must do it this way as well ...when most of the world doesn't."

Finally, there was a Youtube video of an Australian mother sharing her experience with EC on a morning show. She simply said,

"When I learned that my child was communicating to me, I couldn't unlearn that."

And there it was; EC was my "in" to knowing more about what my daughter was thinking. If my baby is telling me something, I certainly wanted to learn her language!

I told Griff everything I had researched and he was immediately on board. We would start tomorrow.

Our first few days as an EC Family coming soon...