LOL.

I took a picture of Ada...

Then she cooed so I copied her...and she just started cracking up, laughing hysterically at me cooing.

6/8/2010

This afternoon in between baby screaming and Rosie chatting I sewed a little skirt.

Rosie got a big sister gift in the mail the other day from Tyler's aunt and uncle. It was a skirt from a local boutique. It looked so easy to replicate, so I told Rosie to pick some fabric from the fabric box. She picked Strawberry Shortcake, of course!

Aside from my sewing machine being a b*tch, this was so ridiculously simple! I'm going to get nicer (read: not tacky cartoon) fabric and make Rosie some more of them. I also want to try full dresses...that will be interesting.

(Tyler snapped this photo with his phone, excuse the quality!)

I just cut a rectangle of fabric, hemmed all the edges so it wouldn't fray, then sewed a band of elastic in the top. OMG easy! Only mistake I made--didn't prewash the fabric. Hope it doesn't shrink up funky.

Ada has been asleep since 6 o'clock this evening. I'd better go to bed in case she wakes up in the middle of the night wide awake. Must be a growth spurt? She usually doesn't go to bed quite so early or sleep like a rock.

Of a Sunday.

Love.

Potty.

Apparently elimination communication pushes us past casual alternative parenting and into just plain weird.

You know you've left the realm of "normal" when you find yourself on the fringe just past that ridiculous club of attachment parents.

I'm not quite sure how I got to this place, where my infant uses the potty and my three year old still nurses and I have 30 chickens in my backyard. But you know what? I like it over here. Things are good. Very good, as a matter of fact. Believe it or not, I'm not sitting over here in this place looking down on everyone else...I'm so busy living and enjoying my own life I have no time to worry about what other parents are doing, or what they're thinking about my choices as a parent.

Sometimes I'm startled when I peek out of my bubble.

Everyone one who hears about elimination communication, whether online or in person, seems flabbergasted by the idea. I can't figure out why it's so shocking! There's nothing shocking about helping my baby keep herself clean and dry...at least I didn't think so...?

The first reaction I get is my favorite. "I've never heard of such a thing!"

Well...what do you think mothers did before the invention of Pampers? Before the invention of washing machines? I doubt busy parents wanted to spend time scrubbing cloth diapers by hand. I'm sure they tried to tune into their baby's needs to pee and poop when they had time, rather than sit and watch them soil another diaper that would then need to be cleaned.

And what about the rest of the world, where there isn't a Walmart full of disposable items on every block? There aren't very many disposable diapers for sale all over the continent of Africa, so what do the mothers do? Pay attention to their baby's cues, of course.

The other reaction I get is, "Oh who has time for that?"

The thing is, it's really not time consuming. It takes as much time to potty the baby as it does to change a diaper, and I'm going to be doing one or the other either way.

Then there's the disbelief reaction I often get.

Natural infant hygiene is a real thing--infants actually do signal before they need to go, they aren't just oblivious to their elimination. Baby Ada will squirm frantically, sometimes she turns red or cries out. She does that for a minute before she pees, and it's plenty of time to take off her diaper and put her on the little potty or take her to the bathroom and hold her. Sometimes I can't potty her at the moment, she pees a million times a day. That's alright though, I just change her diaper every time she pees in it so she's not sitting in something wet and uncomfortable.

Sometimes she doesn't want to use the potty and that's alright too. I just put a diaper back on her.

Ada keeps her diaper dry all night long most nights, sometimes for 12 hours! Even I have some disbelief over that. At night she sleeps in a t-shirt and a prefold with no cover. If she does have to pee during the night, which is rare, she wakes me up by squirming and crying out in her sleep. I keep the little potty next to the bed.

She usually wakes me up every morning by squirming around and grunting, which is my cue to wake her up and potty her. Then she relaxes and goes back to sleep for an hour or so. She likes to be dry and she doesn't want to pee in the bed. If she does pee at night she cries until I change her diaper. (We sleep on an absorbent pad, which protects against baby puke and potty accidents for her and leaking breast milk for me.

People misunderstand the idea behind EC. It's not about potty training an infant. It's not about forcing your baby to never use a diaper. It's not about being totally diaper-free for most people, though reducing the amount of diapers you have to use is a plus.

Elimination communication is just what it sounds like--communicating with your baby.

It's simply another way you can meet your baby's needs, just like soothing her when she cries, or knowing when she's hungry or when she's tired. It's not so extreme when you think of it that way. As a momma I try to meet all of my baby's needs as well as I can!

I'm so glad I discovered EC back when Rosie was 9 months old. So far trying it with an infant has been kind of a fun challenge and I've been pleasantly surprised at how Ada has responded. She loves being pottied most of the time.

We aren't that weird, I promise. EC is just a normal part of life for us now.

Erm, well maybe I am a little strange sometimes.

But there really is no such thing as normal.

Right?

Right???

Well, if there is I guess I just don't want to know about it. I'm ok with being a little strange.

Woolbert.

Today when I was pulling weeds I came across a very, very tiny woolly worm.

Do you know what I'm talking about? Those hairy, fuzzy caterpillars that are brown and black? The amount of brown and black on their bodies is supposed to predict how mild or harsh the winter will be...at least that's what old people here say.

This woolly worm I found is the smallest one I have ever seen. I've never found one in the spring before, usually you see them when they are full grown and out in masses during the fall months.

When I saw it I immediately called Rosie over to look. She was enthralled, but didn't want it to crawl on her and screamed when it tried to. When she screamed the woolly worm rolled into a little ball to play dead. It had her tricked for a second, instinctive little creature.

We took it inside and put it in a jar with some weeds. Rosie carried it around for several hours. She noted that clover was its favorite food, we could see its tiny mouth eating holes in the leaves!

Eventually we looked up how to care for them. The care sheet suggested planting dandelions in a container then covering the dirt with old leaves. I think we might try that tomorrow.

It seems that the caterpillar will eat tons and grow all summer until it makes a cocoon this fall, then it will hatch out as an Isabella Tiger Moth in the spring. I wonder if we can keep it alive that long...

Might be exciting.

Did you know Isabella Tiger Moths have no mouth or way to eat food?

The woolly worm spends its entire life growing big enough to make a cocoon and transform into this stunning moth, and then it hatches out, stretches its wings, mates, and dies.

At first I thought, how sad! Then I realized that maybe I'm looking at it from the wrong perspective. Maybe the entire point of its life isn't the end goal of becoming a beautiful moth. Instead it lives each day in bliss--wandering around, eating, growing as fat as possible, making the most of the period of life when it actually can eat.

I don't know. It's strange to think about--that nature would work this way. The woolly worm's metamorphosis is so intricate and mysterious, yet it doesn't include something as basic as a mouth to eat with.

We had a better day today--Rosie, Ada, and I. Ada was a bit happier, which was wonderful.

First thing this morning...this is what I wake up to everyday!

Rosie loves to help me with Ada in the morning. They lay in bed together while I get dressed, put on make-up, and sometimes I can get as far as filling up the buckets of chicken feed before Ada starts crying.

But other times Rosie is...too helpful...and Ada morphs in to Captain Angry pants.

Rosie had a good day today, I think. I took a suggestion from a blog I enjoy and transformed her binder of worksheets for "school" into a dry erase binder. I put all of the papers in page protectors so that she can do them, erase, and try again later. This will save so much paper and ink! I can't believe this never occurred to me sooner, what a great idea!!

Rosie absolutely loved it too. She worked on different pages on and off all day long. She's learning her letters, the sounds they make, and how to write them. I put a lot of different tracing pages in the binder for her to try out. and some printed out lined paper to practice writing her own letters. I mixed in some fun things too, like mazes and connect the dots.

The only downside is that the dry erase markers stain clothing. They never wash out, trust me. Learned that the hard way when she got a dry erase board for Christmas. Aside from that the dry erase busy binder is perfect.

We also spent some time reading in the Little House on the Prairie book. Reading this book is going slowly because I only read it when she wants to...she'll be interested for a few days, then not interested for a month or more. Today she was really into it. It was so fun watching her enthralled in the book, using her imagination instead of looking at pictures. When Jack the dog went missing in the rushing water she was so upset. When Laura thought she saw a wolf in the night Rosie was on the edge of her seat gripping my arm!

Love it.