Infant potty training take two

Disclaimer: this is a post in which I discuss poop.

I wrote here about my experience  and reasons for trying the so-called "elimination communication." After this post I had a lot of success getting Laney to go on the potty. I would ask her if she needed to poop and if she did she would sign and say it. There was a week straight in which she did not poop in her diaper once. After that she came down with some kind of illness. It included a lot of diarrhea. So obviously, I did not try and get her to use the potty while she was sick. After she got better, I was unable to get her to use the potty again. This has gone on for the past month. I was getting rather frustrated and ready to just give up...

...until yesterday. I had a not so great day and realized I was getting rather annoyed at Laney for not using the potty. She would come to me and tell me she needed to poop just so that I would take her diaper off and then refuse to sit on the potty only to poop a few minutes later in her diaper. I figured out that my frustration was obvious to Laney. Yesterday during her nap I did some reading up on the subject and everyone is pretty unanimous that you have to keep it relaxed, treat the accidents very casually, etc.

I completely changed my attitude. When Laney woke up from her nap I had the potty out in the living room. I let her examine it and I didn't push it. I had her diaperless for the entire evening so that she'd be aware if she peed right away. I just used a diaper cover with a absorbent cloth inside it to protect the rug and furniture. All of a sudden she was wanting to use her potty and she ran and brought it to me. Told me she had to poop. I sat her on the potty and she went within a minute. We took it to the toilet and she happily flushed it down and was obviously proud of herself. We had quite a bit more success with peeing too yesterday.

This morning I just put the potty out in the living room. I went into the office and Laney went and grabbed the potty, brought it to me and started sitting on it. I asked her if she needed to use it and she obviously wanted to so I took off her diaper and she sat down, peed, then started clapping. This happened twice. We also had one accident, but I simply pointed the accident out to her and told her that it goes in the potty and let her watch me clean it up.

Anyways, sorry for all the poop information, but I'm always curious if other people are trying this method and how it goes for them. I am also totally amazed at how much these little ones pick up on subtle things like our attitude. My frustration is what I think has hampered progress in the last month. I changed my tone and didn't push it and Laney picked up on it right away and did a complete one-eighty.