What Would You Do?

You are already running late and while stuffing gently putting your toddler daughter's shoes on, you smell it. You know, you rather suspect your charming and well-behaved offspring has made a poopy. You are taking her to a caregiver and have packed more than enough extra diapers for the day. What do you do?

1. You immediately change her diaper. It isn't hygienic for her to have poop on her bottom for longer than a second.
2. You swear under your breath (and pretend later, when she repeats that word cheerfully to your significant other that you have no idea where she could have learned it), then change the diaper.
3. You leave everything exactly as it is. It's only a 3 minute drive after all, it isn't that bad. Pampers are really absorbent, right? There's rash cream in the bag. You can pretend when you get to the caregiver that the sweet little dear did it in the car and act all hurried, so they'll get the hint and change the diaper for you.
4. You would never ever be one of those parents who is always late because of the pressures of toddler-wrangling. You also wouldn't find yourself questioning if you had brushed your teeth while in the car on the way there.

So I know what I did (I'll give you hint, it wasn't #4). I also know which thoughts passed through my head in the interim.

Usually I Don't Judge Other People, But...

Okay, so that isn't 100% true. I do enjoy sitting in judgment of other people. But usually I try to keep my hands off other people's crazy-pants parenting notions, and certainly don't use my public forum to advertise that I think it is a crazy-pants notion. Because I understand that what works for my family might not be what works for someone else's family.

But this morning, I stumbled upon the weirdest parenting trend I've ever heard of. I would be thrilled if the Bug potty trains on the early side of the normal window. Diapers are bloody inconvenient and expensive. Even cloth diapering, which costs less in the long run, is not without a large share of handling another person's poop. But this Elimination Communication movement is nutty. It is a set of ideas that you can actually start reading your baby's signs and put them on a potty at the age of 4 months, and go largely diaper-free.

The principles of EC include some the basics of attachment parenting: listening to your baby's signals, paying attention to their habits and behaviour, and so on. It also suggests helping Baby to associate a certain sound with the different potty events, so that if you put your baby on the pot and make a particular sound, they will ... um... respond, as it were.

Okay, so far we've seen the part that made me go, "hmmm... interesting, but not for me." Here's the part that made me think "this is bat s&%^ crazy, I have to blog about this." They suggest that as one becomes attuned to one's child's urges, one will be able to rely on intuition to figure out when baby needs to "go." Here are some of the ways they mention that one might feel the tug of elimination-related intuition:

• a sudden thought along the lines of "She needs to pee."
• wondering or questioning, "Does he need to go?"
• "seeing" or "hearing" the word "pee" or cueing sound (see below)
• "just knowing" that your baby needs to pee
• feeling the urge to pee yourself
• feeling a warm wet spreading over your lap or other area while baby is dry

(From "Getting Started" on diaperfree.org)
Apparently, though this method, one can become so attuned to Baby's bathroom habits that they can just psychically know when to put Baby on the pot.

Even if this works, no thank you. I really don't want to be that attuned to any other being's bathroom habits. I would like to, at least bathroom habit wise, return to the part of DH and I's relationship wherein we both pretended we didn't do that sort of thing.