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Track 3, Occasional EC Even once a day or once in a while is a great opportunity for your baby to get used to the potty and the concept of eliminating in it. Babies tend to most obviously signal when they’re about to poop, so most parents on this track try catching poops first. The big advantage: you don’t have to clean smeared poop off your baby! As my friend Rachel says, you actually come less into contact with poop when you’re EC’ing because it goes right into the toilet or potty; you’re not wiping gobs of it off your baby with a thin little wipe.

SPECIFIC ISSUES AND COMMON CONCERNS

EC on the Go

No matter how smoothly EC may be going in the comfort of your own home, it’s a rare parent who isn’t daunted at first by the prospect of EC’ing on the go. Dirty public toilets, friends who don’t have a potty in their homes, public transportation, or being stuck in traffic—all this may be enough to make a parent just want to give up! It is, of course; an option to reserve EC for the times when you’re home. Lots of EC’ing parents do this. Your baby is still going to remain aware if you’re not applying EC everywhere you go. But if you are willing to try EC while you’re out and about, there are plenty of parents out there who can assure you that incorporating the process into an active life is perfectly manageable.

Some parents travel with their babies in training pants and just take along a change of clothes. They offer a pottytunity before and after outings. For instance, if they’re going out to a friend’s house, they might offer the potty right before leaving (and also scout out the bathroom situation once they’ve arrived at their destination). Practice makes it a lot easier. My friend Dara potties her baby absolutely everywhere she goes. She’s been doing it so long that she doesn’t have to think twice, and she’s more than comfortable pottying her baby in stores, restaurants, outdoors, at friends’ houses, and so on.

My babies were fairly regular, so I knew their patterns well. Daniel would have a bowel movement early in the morning, and I could count on that being it for the rest of the day. He’d also have a couple pees in the morning and then be dry for a few hours at a time in the afternoon (a typical pattern for many babies, by the way). So I could loosely plan around this schedule and know that if I were going to go out in the morning, I should put him in a backup diaper. If it was during the afternoon, I could be pretty sure that, with a pee before and after going out, underwear or a training pant would more than suffice.

If this all sounds complicated, I can assure you that it was much less overwhelming than it might sound on paper. With surprisingly little practice, you’re going to develop an intuitive, unconscious sense of your baby’s patterns. In the same way that, when planning an outing, you take into consideration when your child is going to be hungry or sleepy, you will easily start to maintain a loose awareness of his elimination patterns.

Observing your baby’s patterns is, again, important here. It’s actually very typical for babies to hold their pee when they are in certain positions, such as when held in a sling or baby carrier. These are not physiologically conducive states for eliminating, and even a non-EC’ed baby is usually uncomfortable going in one of these positions.

It’s just as important to be aware of the times your baby doesn’t go to the bathroom as it is to keep track of the times she does go. This means that if you are taking a walk and your baby is in a sling, you can be pretty sure that you’ll have a peeing opportunity right after you take her out of the sling. She probably will not go while snuggled against your body (especially if you offered her an opportunity before you left). This may also be the case if she’s in a car seat or a stroller. In general, the more your baby gets used to going to the bathroom outside of a diaper, the more likely she is to signal her desire to go to the bathroom outside of a diaper.

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