Week 9 IPT

We decided to try something that was already natural for babies, called infant potty training. As you can see the common practise in North America, we are training the babies from birth that it's OK to pee and poo into a diaper, contrary to what the babies would rather do naturally... reference to the projecile poo incident! And then when they are toddlers, they are expected to unlearn this. The web references say it's about communication, timing and patience. http://www.timl.com/ipt/

Since we've already been washing her bum in the sink and while squirming and crying, there was always poo squirting, it's almost like we've been doing IPT already without realizing it. It's happened a few times that she's peed in the sink too. Now it's just associating those actions with a noise like "Annnngggh...boot boot" and "Awwh Shhhhh Shhhhhh" as the first step, then later on when I can recognize her timings, these words will become commands to release the muscles.

I started officially last night. The usual practise is a diaper change before feeding, which is usually preceded by a nap/ sleep cycle. So at 9pm it was very natural for us to take off the diaper and just wait for a poo and a pee, so we made the signal noises so she could learn to associate the actions with the words. She even peed twice! Brian gave her a bath and then we had the last feeding before the official bedtime. Well she woke up again at 1030pm so we thought maybe she had to go again. The diaper was still clean! So we did the whole procedure all over again and even reused the same clean diaper and put her back to sleep.

I mean, it's not possible to do this everytime especially in the middle of the night or when we're at the mall but they say even if it's done only part-time the early training goes a long way! The idea is to change the diaper often so she will learn NOT to be comfortable in a wet diaper, and we're using cloth so it's all easy to clean and hang dry! I'm glad I heard about these techniques early enough because I'm still within the window of optimum learning at 0 to 6 months.