Part-Time EC with a Newborn for New Moms (and Dads!)

EPISODE 264: Part-Time EC with a Newborn for New Moms (and Dads!)

Nicole Cheever:
So you want to try elimination communication, but you're worried about new parent overwhelm and it being “just one more thing.” Or maybe you're already there but you just can't shake that gnawing feeling that EC might be right for you. Allow me to introduce you to the magic of part-time EC. This is episode 264, Part-Time EC With a Newborn For New Moms (and Dads!).

Hello and welcome to the Go Diaper Free podcast. I'm your host, Nicole Cheever, Go Diaper Free certified coach and mama to three kiddos who all went through EC and potty training at different ages and stages.

Hello, welcome back. Thank you so much for joining me here on the Go Diaper Free podcast. I'm Nicole Cheever and this is episode 264, Part-Time EC With a Newborn For New Moms (and Dads!). You can find all of the show notes, everything I'm going to mention today linked over at godiaperfree.com/264. Please make sure you head over there when you're done listening and let us know if you have any questions, share your experience with us. We love to hear from you. If you're watching on YouTube or listening on your favorite podcast player, please make sure to subscribe so you're alerted anytime we have a new episode out.

All right, let's talk about newborn EC. Brand new parents, brand new baby. If you're pregnant listening to this, or maybe you have a teeny tiny baby in your arms, congratulations! We want to help you start EC without feeling like it's this overwhelming, crazy new thing that you have to do. So many people have this idea about EC just being one more thing, one thing to add to the heap of things to do with a newborn, and that can feel so overwhelming. So today I want to talk about part-time EC because I think this is a great way for people to be introduced to EC, especially if you're the only one in your community or your family who's decided to try it. That can be really overwhelming and daunting.

First, I want to let you know what resources we have. Of course, there's a Go Diaper Free book, that's going to be your handbook for all things elimination communication. It's totally comprehensive. It's got troubleshooting and everything. We also have “The Golden Window” Newborn EC program. It's a digital program, it's video based, but there's transcripts as well if you prefer to read. And Andrea is walking you through everything you need to know to do elimination communication with a newborn without anything else. The book has every age and stage, and that can be really overwhelming. So if you are going to get the book, just make sure you only read the newborn part to start with. Don't worry about everything down the road. You'll get to it when you get to it.
You also have the private book owners area. It's an online community where you can ask questions and get support from coaches and from other parents, to help you through every agent stage. So don't feel like you have to sit down and read the thing cover to cover. It's actually better a lot of times just to read the sections you need so you're not psyching yourself out for what's to come because maybe it's not going to happen for you. Maybe your child isn't going to run into that troubleshooting issue.

We want to start really simple. Just get the tools and the resources you need for this stage for just starting out. Sometimes more information is just more, it's not helpful. It can confuse you, it can overwhelm you. So go ahead and just give yourself permission now to just start with the basics.

Also, I really want to encourage dads to get in on this. Dads and partners, sometimes they can feel a little bit lonely when mom is feeding the baby and bonding with the baby and holding the baby. Baby and mom are still very much attached in the beginning of their life in that fourth trimester, and it can be hard to find your place. EC is another great way, just like diaper changes or bottle feeding or burping or playing with the baby. It's another great way that you can bond with the baby. In my coaching practice I have seen so many dads, and in my personal life with my husband, have seen so many dads just totally excel at EC and take ownership of it and take it over as their role, and that's really fun and really sweet to see. So dads, I really want to encourage you if you're listening to this to jump in.

We want to start you guys off with easy catches and we call these easy catches because they're the points where most likely your baby is going to need to go potty, but also we want them to actually be easy. If you hear wake-up pees, that's the first one I want to talk about, don't think you have to potty your baby at every single wake-up. We're talking about part-time, EC here. Part-time EC is still EC. You're still getting all the benefits, you're still learning your baby's signals, you're still teaching your baby cues. There's really no way to mess up newborn EC. You can't do it wrong. And I think for me personally, because I did not start from birth with my oldest, that was my biggest fear was doing it wrong. I was going to mess it up somehow or make it harder for myself. There's really no way to mess it up. So just get that thought completely out of your head.

We'll take the wake-up pee for instance. Anytime your newborn wakes up, they're usually sleeping a lot, so there are a lot of opportunities throughout the day to take them for this wake-up pee. You just hold them over something, the bathroom sink, the toilet, a bowl, whatever you have. You can absolutely get a Top Hat Potty if you think that that would be useful to you, but we're just starting simple here, so just try it first. Let's just get your first catch, and then you can worry about all the gear and supplies that might make it a little bit easier to do it more full-time or just more frequently. But let's just start with the wake-up pee.

Just pick a pee. If you're listening right now and your baby's sleeping, the very next time they wake up, just take the diaper off and hold them over something and that's it. Just do one a day. Make a plan to do one a day. It's a good idea if you can to try and do it around the same time every day, but again, you really can't mess this up, so don't overthink it. Take your baby, take their diaper off, hold them over something. If they do pee, cue along with them, pssss or pshhhh, make a sort of water rushing sound and that's it, you've started. And then from there, you'll find other ways to fit it into your day more frequently. You can start to do two wake-up pees a day or all the wake-up pees, whatever you want to do.

Another great one is diaper changes. When they're brand, brand new, they're not usually fully emptying their bladder into the diaper because they still have that instinct intact to not pee all over themselves. So they're crying, waiting for that diaper to be taken off, and maybe they couldn't hold it any longer, but there might still be a little bit left in the tank. So rather than getting yourself peed on, if you notice that baby's diaper is wet, take them to the potty, take them to the sink, use that bowl, whatever you've decided to make your life simple, and hold them over it and give that cue sound again.

You can also cue along with them peeing or pooping in their diaper to help them build that sound association. So we usually do that whooshing or water rushing sounds, pssss or pshhhh for pee and then grunting, mmh mmh for poop, and they will start to learn that sound association. So even when you're not doing EC, you're still doing EC, if that makes sense. Even when you're not holding them over something, you can still be building that connection for them and showing them that you're there, understanding what they need and to help them with it.

Those are some of the easy catches. There are more of them, but I want to start you guys off super basic. So try a wake-up pee or try a diaper change. Just start with that. Very simple, easy-peasy.

I want to talk a little bit about back-ups and then we're going to give some more resources for if you want to get more into a full-time EC after you have tried it, after you've done your part-time EC. Disposable versus cloth. You do not have to use cloth diapers for EC. You can absolutely use disposable diapers. It's up to you. When they're new, they already have that instinct, even though the disposable diaper is absorbent, to not pee on themselves. You can still capitalize on that. We did full-time EC with my youngest and we started her at 10 days old, and we used disposable diapers probably for the first three months of her life, exclusively. And then we moved to cloth because I had cloth in bigger sizes for my other children, and of course that's somewhat of a cost savings, but we did not use cloth diapers from the beginning. You can absolutely practice EC with disposable diapers.

I will warn you, it might feel a little bit like you're wasting them because you will get some skid marks in them, just because babies tend to leak poop here and there anytime they have gas or sometimes they haven't finished pooping, and you get a little bit in the diaper. In those cases, you can't really reuse the disposable diapers. In a cloth diaper, especially if you have a prefold, if you just have a little skid mark, you can fold it over the other way and still use it again, but you can't quite do that with a disposable. That's not safe. That can cause diaper rash. So it can feel like a waste, and in a way that's good, that can be a motivator for you to do more full-time EC or switch to cloth. But just remember, you do not have to use cloth diapers when you're doing EC and many people who do part-time EC don't. We also used disposables at night all the time just because that prevented a lot of rash for us, prevented compression leaks and it just worked better for our family.

All of those onesies you were gifted. Maybe you were planning on doing EC or thinking about it, but you didn't really tell anybody and a lot of your family brushed you off anyway, and they still got you all those snap crotch onesies. You can still do EC with those silly onesies. We had a ton of those with my youngest and a lot of times, if it's just the three snaps in the middle, we would only close the middle snap when we were at home because then you could just pop it open, take that disposable diaper off, and potty the baby. If you have snaps all the way along the legs in something that's got pants on it, you can leave just the ankles and the middle one snapped and just pop them on and off baby's ankles. There's lots of techniques, and you'll figure it out, of ways to still use all the conventional baby clothing while still being able to practice EC. And especially if you're only doing it part-time, that would be really frustrating or cumbersome if you were doing full-time EC. But with part-time, if you're only doing it a couple of times a day, then it's not usually that annoying to just take a couple of snaps off.

You can go ahead and start stocking up on things like gowns. A lot of the gowns still have the onesie neckline where if you do have a blowout or something, you can actually pull the whole outfit off the baby downward. You pull the neck open and pull it down instead of up over baby's head. That can be really helpful. You can also use kimono shirts, which a lot of people use in the early days anyway, just so it doesn't bother the umbilical stump. You can use kimono shirts and pants, you can do long socks or leggings instead of pants, and you can also use chaps. There are Tiny Chaps over at Tiny Undies and you would just put the diaper over the chaps, and that would make getting the diaper off quicker and easier for when you do want to potty your baby.

Those are some good tips for you. I hope that's encouraging for part-time EC. Remember, it's still EC, you're still getting lots of benefits. I will tell you, it can be a little bit of a gateway sometimes when you start doing EC with your baby and they start realizing and making those connections that you are going to help them eliminate, they're going to start asking for it more. You can't unlearn those signals from your baby. Once you notice how to tell if they have to go potty, you can't forget that. So you'll start noticing it more and more throughout the day, and it will probably snowball into full-time EC. But I just want to get you started with this really simple and easy, just at the beginning, do one or two easy catches a day. Don't worry about getting a bunch of gear or anything. Let's just start. Take the diaper off and there you've started.

When you want to get into more full-time EC, you might already be past the newborn phase, but you can try episode 15. Or maybe you're listening to this and you're like, "Nope, I definitely want to do it full-time. I don't want to bother with part-time. I'm going to go all in or nothing." Preparing for EC with a newborn is episode 15. And remember though, even full-time, most of us really still only go for about 50% of the pees, because we have modern life, and we have carpets and cars and all those sorts of things, that leaving a baby without a diaper all day long would be too much. So even if you're doing full-time EC, you're not trying to get 100% or be perfect. There's no point in trying to be perfect. We're all perfectly imperfect.

There's also A Day In The Life: ECing A Newborn, episode 54. So you can listen to that and see exactly what it's like going through a whole day with a newborn if you were doing full-time EC. Then there's also What to Expect with EC in the Newborn Phase, and that's episode 190. It talks about all of the developmental milestones and anything you might come across when you're going through leaps and everything from zero to four months.

That's it for today. That's all the resources I have for you. Please head over to godiaperfree.com/264 and let us know: are you planning to start EC with a newborn? Are you pregnant? Do you have a newborn between zero and four months? Are you wanting to start EC? Did this episode encourage you, or do you still have outstanding questions of how to do part-time EC and just get that first catch? Please leave them in the comments for us over there, godiaperfree.com/264. Make sure you tune in next week. Over the next few weeks, we're continuing this series on elimination communication for new parents, so please keep tuning in. Please join us. Thank you so much for being here today, and we'll see you next time.

Want to catch your first pee today? Grab Andrea's free Easy Start Guide and do just that. It's only one page and it will change your world. Get it at godiaperfree.com/start. We'll see you next time.