This is the Go Diaper Free Podcast with Andrea Olson, session 14 - time to trust that intuition!
Welcome to the Go Diaper Free Podcast, where we're all about teaching you how to stop changing diapers, starting at birth. And now your host…she finally got hitched…Andrea Olson.
Hello everyone. Yep, I finally got hitched, July 27. It was a mountain wedding...beautiful time and I just adore my husband. He is so much fun, and so much like me in all the ways he needs to be in order for us to get along! You know what I mean. :) So, yeah, this episode, we’re gonna talk about intuition, and part of picking a partner in life is based on your intuition, your gut feeling about that person, so that sort of ties in nicely.
This episode of the Go Diaper Free podcast covers the final of 4 ways to know that your baby needs to pee: Intuition. As a reminder, the first 3 were Baby’s Signals, Baby’s Natural Timing or Rhythm, and Generic or Common Timing. This fourth, your own Intuition, completes what I like to teach as “The 4 Roads to Potty Time.” When any of these 4 instances occurs, and you are able and/or willing to offer, you will know it’s a good time to offer the potty to your baby. Without knowledge of one of these 4, or by just using 1 of the four because you don’t know about the others, you’re not going to have as much success. With all 4 in your arsenal, you will have a better, overall handle on knowing when it’s time to use EC, or time to just chill and be with baby or lead your life.
So, let’s discuss intuition so you can understand what this 4th way of knowing is….
What is Intuition?
Sometimes you “just know.”
Women in tribal societies are extremely in touch with their intuition. According to the EC texts I’ve read, indigenous women often potty their babies nonchalantly in mid-conversation or activity. They do it in a matter-of-fact way, often responding to what an outsider might think is “nothing.”
That is intuition in action, and you may have it too! Some people are able to pick up on and act timely upon their intuitive hunches. Some simply aren’t wired that way.
What It Might Be Like…
Notice your thoughts and your misses and catches. See if the thoughts, feelings, hunches, sensations, and perhaps even visuals preceding the pee/poo correspond to your baby actually going. You might be more intuitive than you guessed.
Do you have a funny feeling that baby may need to go (or can’t possibly need to go again)? Does the word “pee” or “poo” cross your mind? Are you imagining baby needing to pee? Do you suddenly have to pee yourself? Some people swear they smell pee or poo before it comes out; others have a vivid thought or insistence inside and are “sure” baby needs to go. I sometimes have dreams that the baby needs to pee, and wake up to find that he needs to go. Notice your intuition and listen to it.
If You Don’t Have It
Sadly, intuition in the Western world is a buried, lost art in many cases. But luckily, as a culture, we are rediscovering this inner guidance system and beginning to trust it once again.
If you don’t feel or think any of the above intuitive thoughts or feelings, don’t fret! Just rely on Signals and Timing and you’ll be fine. Not everyone has potty intuition (sometimes it doesn’t appear until the second baby!). You may or may not have it. It’s all good, either way.
Older Children Might
If you have other children, they tend to be hyper-intuitive. Listen to their intuitions as well and invite them to share a hunch that baby may need to potty.
Advice from a Sage
This is from a woman on the EC Yahoo! Group: “Always act on sudden random potty thoughts immediately (you are usually picking up on subconscious signals).”
Now I love this. It’s the sudden random potty thoughts. It’s not the ones that you’re just thinking about pottying all day long, and you’re kind of obsessing about it. We all do that, so if you’re guilty of that don’t feel bad. But, you do need to learn how to distinguish between the two. A sudden random potty thought is probably more intuitive than a “oh my gosh, oh my gosh, oh my gosh, does she need to go?” sort of persistent paranoid thought. So there’s a distinction between the two of those. And that’s really it.
Oh, the other thing I really wanted to mention was husbands, since we started off with getting hitched and all that. If you have a partner, a husband, a domestic partner, parent you live with and coparent with, or one of your parents, whoever is helping you raise your baby - your daycare attendance, live-in nanny, whoever it is - one of these people might have better intuition than you do around pottying. So, be open to that. Especially those of you with husbands out there.
I know a lot of times - and maybe you’re the husband listening to this and this resonates for you - but a lot of times new mothers, especially, really want to do it all themselves, and they become really territorial (I know I was)...you really want to be on top of everything and be the know-it-all, the subject matter expert about your own baby.
But the thing that we don’t really realize is that our husbands have an incredible amount of intuition as well, and if given the chance to be a part of this EC process, which I fully encourage all the husbands out there to participate - you might find that your husband has a way better intuition about pottying than you do...sort of a sixth sense kind of a thing.
So, be open to that. Be open to your daycare worker, even your mother, your mother-in-law, and their intuition around pottying. And if somebody in the room has an intuition about it, and they live with you or they’re there a lot, give them permission to take and potty your baby when they feel that intuition, that intuitive urge.
And that’s all I have to say about this. This is a pretty short episode here. You can get the show notes for this episode at godiaperfree.com/14.
Now I’m gonna tell you what’s coming up next week. This is super-exciting. I am preparing to have my baby, so I am going to do an episode for #15 that is called Preparing for EC with a New Baby - I’ll tell you how to gear up.
So stay tuned for that next week. If you want to be alerted when that episode comes out, because it’s not - especially if I have the baby before that episode airs - it’s not necessarily exactly every week that I air a new episode, but I try to make it weekly. So, make it easy on yourself and go to iTunes and subscribe to the podcast...that way you’ll never miss a show. You can do that by going to godiaperfree.com/itunes, and just clicking subscribe and going through that whole process. And I think it can automatically update to your iPhone and all the things like that. So, if you’re tech savvy or if you’re not, look into that. Email me if you have any questions - andrea@godiaperfree.com - and if there’s something that you’d like to hear on this podcast, email that to me as well.
And, until next time, have a wonderful time pottying your baby. Take care.
