My wife and I have started doing the elimination communication method with Baby Burrito Bowl. It’s basically potty training at an extremely early age. We started with Baby Burrito Bowl when she was two weeks old.
“Why, why would you do that?”- typical response.
We live in Portland, so we have a lot of hippie influences. Also, poop is not a lot of fun. Baby poop is considerably more fun than toddler poop, however. We like that diapers exist because we enjoy the convenience of not having baby shat all over our floors, but we are fearful of the day Baby Burrito Bowl starts to eat solid food. Once that happens her innocent infant defections turn to satanist toddler explosions and I’m not psychologically built for that.
Mrs. Burrito Bowl would like to add that we’re also doing it for environmental reasons. The sooner she gets potty trained the less diapers we’ll use. Using less diapers will not only save us money, but more importantly, save the planet. I’m not sure how it works, but the less diapers that end up in landfills the better.
Fun Fact: Every 100 diapers you save counteracts 1/15 of a second of Al Gore's private jet use. Together we can make a difference.
Enter: Elimination Communication.
If you’re unfamiliar with it, the basic idea is you try to read your babies thoughts and facial expressions in an ill-fated attempt to time when they need to use the potty. Once you think you’ve arrived at that magical moment, you hold them over the potty and say, “Psssss…” or make a grunting noise.
Here’s what it looks like in practice:
It doesn’t always work out. Sometimes it looks like this:
She’s gotten a lot better at it, though. So usually it looks like this.
Today it looked like this:
The “Psss…” sound is when you want to signal them to pee and the grunty noise is when you think they need to poop. You hold them against your stomach so they can feel your abs flex when you make the grunting sound. They start to mimic the grunt and it helps them release their poop.
It’s really funny when we grunt and this tiny human mimics with a miniature grunt of her own. That cute little grunt alone is worth the effort, but not dealing with toddler poop is the real prize.
They lead the dance, you just get them to associate the noise.
Eventually you can get them to pee on command. If you’re about to go on a long car ride and really want them to pee beforehand you hold them over the potty and start making “Pssss…” sounds in their ear. Then, they pee. This is obviously great because they won’t spend the next two hours with a wet diaper. Baby is happier and parent is happier. Win-win.
“I feel like this won’t work.” – Skeptic
Right? You wouldn’t think it would, but it does. Babies are born being able to control when they release their waste. Leaving them in diapers until they pee or poop trains them to ignore this control. Then, we desperately try to retrain them to listen to their bodies once they reach the age that their poop becomes possessed by demons.
For the most part they naturally wait until they wake up to pee or poop. They don’t usually pee WHILE they’re sleeping. This is a good starting point for knowing when they probably need to go.
We noticed Baby Burrito Bowl would do her thing about 5 minutes after waking up from a nap. If she’d been awake for a while she would also get a little fussy right before she needed to go.
When she was two weeks old we tried it for the first time. She woke up from a nap and I took her diaper off and held her over the potty. As soon as I grunted she sent an explosion of baby poop into the toilet. It was amazing. I’ve never been so happy in a poop-related instance.
It doesn’t always work this well, and we still go through a lot of diapers, but Baby Burrito Bowl knows when we hold her over the potty it’s time to get to work. She still goes in her diaper, especially if we’re not on top of our game, but she goes a significant amount in the potty.
The goal is to get less and less waste in her diaper and more into the potty, until eventually her diapers are always dry.
My sisters did this method with their kids and they were all 80% potty trained by about eight months and 100% potty trained by eighteen months. They were out of diapers completely before most people even begin to think about potty training. Their kids would be running around with pants constantly falling down because they didn’t have the expected bulk of the diapers to help hold them up. It was a hilarious byproduct of the elimination communication method.
There are downsides to this method, namely- It takes a lot of upfront work.
Doing the elimination communication method means spending a lot of time grunting in the bathroom while your baby stares off at the wall. For the first while they don’t actually know what the sounds mean. You just have to do it enough times that they associate the sound with the feeling of needing to pee or poop.
Baby Burrito Bowl likes to poop mostly in the mornings. This means when she starts grunting at 6am we can’t just let her fill her diaper while we happily sleep. One of us has to get up and take her to the bathroom and sit with her until she goes.
We are only four months into it but so far we’re really happy with how she’s doing. It’s not entirely a linear progression. Some weeks she does better than others, but overall we all get better and better at it. We get better at reading her and she gets better at communicating that she needs to go.
If you’re thinking about trying the elimination communication method I highly recommend it.
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Also, here’s a few more baby related articles, if that’s your thing.
January Recap- Pooping, Crying, and The Baby Did Stuff Too
11 Best Ways (For Men) to Tell Which Baby is Yours at Daycare
Saying Goodbye to the Dink Days-Preparing for Our Baby Girl with FI in Mind
If you’re interested in learning more about the elimination communication method here are a couple other resources:
Also feel free to start a conversation with us on Twitter @MrBurritoBowl
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My mother did this with all three of her children and was very happy with the results. My older brother didn’t dirty a diaper after the age of nine months. He’s 78 now and hasn’t forgotten how!
Wish we had started this with ours. You are correct. Baby poop is not fun. Toddler poop is even less fun (though at least slightly more formed). That beign said, we use mostly cloth diapers, which we aren’t actually saving any money because my mom keeps buying more “because they were cute!”. Maybe next baby we will try this.
We did cloth diapers for the first couple months. We need to get back into it. Good work on the cloth front!