diaper free baby

On Saturday, Lilly will be 23 months, almost 2! Such a big girl. And now entirely diaper free. I'm so glad my friend Amanda told me about the Diaper-Free Baby book with it's explanation of elimination communication. I had never heard of it! We had considered cloth diapers, environmentally friendly diapers, and regular diapers, but I had never heard of the E.C. approach.

Lilly pooped in the toilet before she was a week old (in this post, there's a couple short videos of Lilly as a tiny infant pooping in the toilet) and continued to do so till she was around six months and could sit up by herself to poop in the potty. We had a setback in Greece last summer (she was around one then) because we hadn't brought her potty and she didn't like being held over the toilet again. She got back into doing it in the potty when we returned to the US last fall.

Then this past February, she suddenly just refused to wear a diaper and we accepted that; I feel we'd been a little lazy not practicing diaper free more at the house, so she was still peeing quite a bit in her diaper. She was diaper free in days. She had maybe only one or two accidents while we were out of the house. By March she was peeing in the potty on the plane. Now she even naps without one (but still wears one at night, though it's mostly dry).

I'm very proud of her big girl achievement, but it really wasn't work at all. What the book says make sense: why train our child to be ok soiling herself and then have to go through the trouble of untraining
her from it when her instinct tells her not to soil herself from the beginning. It's been easy, really.

And Lilly loves not wearing a diaper! She loves being without clothes in general, as you can see in this little video of her from earlier this week, spinning around dancing, taking Baby Rita for a turn too. 



Other than music and dancing and mothering her babies and stuffed animals, she loves reading, making "kaffi" (coffee!) and "mat" (food) that she'll feed her babies before putting them to sleep (sove), organizing her things, (pretend) counting them (she's learning...), and playing with her cell phone and new laptop (thanks uncles Blake and Rick!).