A MUCH BETTER BLOG

Use code EC5 through the end of June to get 5% off all EC and Potty products in our store. EC and potty products include organic training pants by Under the Nile, Imse Vimse and Little Beetle as well as EcaPants drop front training pants, waterproof training pants, tiny organic undies, wetbags by Bummis and more.

Has it been 9 months already???? Bianca has been on the outside almost as long as she was on the inside. I can hardly believe it. Time has flown but it has been good time. We are having a blast.

She continues to be a fabulous baby who is loved by all. She engages strangers and cashiers when we are out and seems to love all people, especially babies (she goes nuts when she sees other babies and usually tries to poke them in the eye).

She continues to be an alert, ridiculously happy, low maintenance baby. While I consider myself exceptionally lucky, I also attribute her demeanor in part to the fact that she is 100% natural with no vaccines, chemicals or other trauma from pregnancy, birth or beyond. Anecdotal I know…..

Here is the rundown of where she is at physically and developmentally.

Appearance
Naturally I think she is the most gorgeous baby in the world (and naturally I thought the same thing of Brielle when she was a baby). It is hard to be objective when talking about your kin. Her hair is coming in fast, brown and curly at the ears. Her eyes are still blue as can be. She is holding steady at eight teeth but I can feel the bumps on her upper gum so more are on the way. Her smile lights up the room.

On top of being gorgeous (there goes proud mommy again), she is BIG. She can easily wear 2T clothes and can wear almost all of Brielle’s summer clothes and pajamas in a pinch. She can’t wear Brielle’s jeans because of length but I am pretty sure her thighs and butt are bigger than Brielle’s are right now. Add a diaper of any kind to that butt and it can actually be difficult to dress her.

I think Bianca weighed about 21 or 22 pounds the last time I weighed her and Brielle is weighing in at 32 pounds (at 4 yrs 4 mo). I don’t think it is a matter of if Bianca catches up but when.

Eating/ Breastfeeding

The girl has an appetite. Holy moly. She didn’t get it from me that’s for sure. Daddy seems to be the generous donor of the appetite/growth gene.

Brielle and I tend to eat like birds and Bianca eats like a ravenous carnivore. She loves food and needs meals multiple times a day which is kind of tough for me since Brielle and I are grazers. Needless to say, we have learned to adapt and grandma bought Bianca a high chair a few months ago which she is very happy to spend time in.

She eats anything and everything. She eats Mexican, Indian, Chinese, sandwiches, meat, raw vegetables, fruit, you name it. Obviously I cut most food into bite sized portions but she is very good at taking bites of sandwich type foods and chewing them very well. She is great in restaurants and gets right down to business.

She is fairly proficient with a spoon and fork. She knows to spear food with the fork and holds it fairly well and can usually get the food to her mouth. The spoon is a messier proposition because it usually involves a liquidy type food like yogurt but she gets a fair amount of food in her mouth. I am impressed. She can also drink from a regular glass with help. I am hoping to skip sippy cups altogether.

She is breastfeeds a lot at night but rarely during the day. She has a tendency to attack me (when nursing) while she is awake by pinching my upper arm, digging her thumbnail into me or any other way of clawing, hitting etc. I have a lot less patience for diddling and picking than I did with Brielle so I pretty much stop it immediately. 99% of the time she is trying to tell me something like she needs to go to the bathroom or has to burp and I figure that out later but I am not willing to be a pin cushion in the meantime. That means that she gets probably 75% of her breastmilk at night.

Talking/signing
Bianca has been making noises that sound an awful lot like words for a few months now. She does it most frequently with her brother’s names and the dog’s names. It happens a little bit too frequently to be written off to coincidence but I would not call it talking quite yet. Pre-talking maybe. The other day I swear on my life that she said “chicken” after I asked her if she wanted chicken. She would not repeat it for anything but I about fell over when she said it.

The words that she is saying consistently and on purpose are “mom” “da-da” “uh-oh” and my personal favorite “ow” which she uses when she is meowing back at one of the cats or addressing the cats (she calls them “ow”. She is also starting to sign a little bit. She signed “more” a couple of times and I almost cried tears of happiness.

Walking
No, she is not walking quite yet but she is standing up unsupported for longer periods of time and cruising the furniture. I have seen her stand up unsupported once and squat down unsupported once. Walking is imminent.

Babywearing
We do it EVERY.SINGLE.DAY. We simply cannot live without our slings.

EC/Diapers

The nighttime EC is not going as well as it was in the past. When she has to go she will stir, wake me up but not quite wake up herself. If I try to potty her she gets pissed (so to speak). In short, she has to go too badly to sleep, but is sleeping too soundly to go.

I either have to wake her up enough to go (which I think is really rude), let her lay there and fuss until she finally goes in a diaper (which I also think is really disrepectful) or try to cajole it out of her by nursing her while she is on a lap potty. Frankly, nothing is really effective so I am just biding time knowing that the times she can hold it through the night (which are few and far between at the moment) are growing more frequent.

On a much more positive note, the daytime EC took a tremendous turn for the better. I was having a lot of difficulty keeping her on the Baby Bjorn little potty after she started crawling. She just would not stay on it. She would crawl away and then do her business in her diaper or training pants. I was still catching the majority of poos but the percentage was going down (fast).

Then one glorious day I put her directly on the toilet with a seat insert and she stayed put! I am assuming she stays there because she cannot launch herself off the toilet and crawl away. I didn’t even bother ECing Brielle on the toilet at that age because she was so content to sit on the little potty and read or play with toys that I never saw the need to rush the toilet.

Now Bianca is doing a fair percentage of her business directly on the toilet which is so much more than I ever expected at this age. I still have to pay attention for the signs but I sense that she is getting close to communicating her need to ‘go’ either verbally or through sign language. I predict that she will be close to 100% trained by 12 months. Could be wishful thinking but time will tell.

As far as diapering goes, I still use prefolds and covers for outings although I am experimenting more with pocket diapers (Fuzzibunz) since I sell them in my store and I like to have personal experience with my products. They work great and they are a lot fuzzier on her bum.

I also relented and used sposies on a recent vacation to avoid doing frequent laundry and to also avoid having pee scented laundry smelling up the place. While the break from laundry was nice, I hated the sposies. I am totally hooked on cloth. I hated the feel on Bianca, I hated trying to pull them over her generous thighs and butt, I hated the crinkly noise they made and I just hated them. I pretty much stopped doing EC for the vacation because it was such a pain to take them down and back up again. I was very happy to get home and get natural fibers back on my baby again.

Motor skills
I don’t know where her skills are supposed to be at this age but she amazes me with her appropriate use of tools. She knows to point the remote at the TV and press the buttons, to hold the broom handle with both hands and push it along the floor and which end of the pen goes to the paper. Maybe I am just a proud mama….or maybe that is super cool for an 8 mo old to do.

She can also open the dog kennel and release the hounds.

Cosleeping

I still love sleeping with Bianca. Sometimes I look at her while she sleeps and I am just overwhelmed with emotion. I love holding her fat little body and snuggling her all night.

I am somewhat embarrassed to admit that despite the fact that she sleeps with me every single night, she sometimes starts out the night in a carseat until she wakes to nurse. I feel guilty while doing it but….well… it works and sometimes we just have just gotta do what works, AP or not.

I expect the cosleeping relationship to carry on as long as she is night nursing but I also suspect she wont stay in bed with me quite as long as Brielle did since she will graduate to sharing a room with her big sister and she gets pretty excited to spend time with Brielle anywhere, anytime.

The first 9 months have been great and I can’t wait to see what the next 9 will bring.

Blackie died a year ago on the 25th. Anyone who said he was “just a cat” hadn’t spent much time with him. I spent over 17 years of my life with him while he was alive and he still touches my life today.

I still miss him tons. His ashes are in an unopened box from the veterinarian. I still can’t bring myself to look at it. It still breaks my heart. I think one of these days I will get an urn and open the box but for now….nope. Can’t do it.

I still struggle with the decision I made to put him to sleep. Everyone I know thinks it was “the right thing to do” but I don’t know. He was crippled from the waist down but healthy from the waist up. He was just as loving and wonderful as he always was. I had a baby on the way and once he started having “accidents” on the same carpet she would be crawling on, I made my decision.

By accidents, I should mention that I had been successfully using elimination communication (EC) with Blackie for months. He would literally hold it until I held him over the toilet to go. He couldn’t physically get into the litter box since his back legs didn’t work but he immediately adjusted to the EC routine after he lost the use of his legs. My parents and other pet sitters were shocked that he would go in the toilet (purring the whole time) with someone holding him up. It was after he went on a “potty strike”, to use an EC term, that he started having accidents on the carpet.

I will always wonder if I could have used a cart, explored surgery, used pet diapers or anything else that could have kept Blackie with us longer. He was such a great cat, great friend and family member. I found out later that there is a no-kill shelter nearby that accepts crippled dogs and cats. I had looked into area shelters in the past without any luck and I cannot imagine why the vet wouldn’t know about this particular shelter, but the fact remains that I discovered it way too late.

We have Blackers now and while no pet can replace the one we lost, Blacker is a delightful cat and he is great with both girls and we are having a super time with him. I still miss Blackie though. Maybe next year I can open the box.

One of the problems of pottying a baby who can barely crawl much less walk is that they cannot just stand up and walk away when they are finished.

Brielle would sit on the pot for a considerable length of time when she was a baby because it let her “sit up” before she could sit up on her own and she liked to play with her toys and books that I kept nearby.

Bianca on the other hand, wants to take off across the room the second she is finished. That means that even though she can hold it until she gets to a potty, there is still a huge potential mess. We realized that potential today.

After fussing for an hour or so (and a few failed attempts) Bianca finally did her business on the potty. I was sitting literally three feet away from her at my computer desk.

While I was saying hello to my brother online, Bianca decided that she was finished and dove off the potty which stuck to her butt and the whole thing tipped over spilling its carefully crafted contents into her training pants which were sitting down by her ankles.

Then she took off across the living room dragging her “filled” (formerly white) trainers behind her, smearing stuff up and down her legs with each crawling motion. The telltale poo stretched from the inside of the overturned potty, down the sides of the potty, in small piles across her little play rug and then up and down her legs and even into her toes.

The Elimination Communication Paradox. EC parents almost never have to deal with poo but when we do…..it isn’t pretty.

You may know her as Blossom, the main character from the early 90s TV show with the same name. Her real name is Mayim Bialik and she is back as a super crunchy, attachment parenting mom of two small boys, Miles, 3 ½, and Fred, 9 months.

Mayim recently appeared on What Not To Wear in the makeover spotlight. I saw the previews but it never occurred to me to watch it because who knew she was 100% AP? I found out after the fact when reading a post by Summer from Wired for Noise. Summer raved about Mayim Bialik and I thought “Who the heck is that?!?”…so I read it and realized “Oh yeah, BLOSSOM!”

As it turns out, Mayim was babywearing in the show, concerned whether or not the new clothes were breastfeeding friendly or not and just overall super-duper AP.

It gets better.

After the show, she was interviewed by Celebrity Baby Blog and it turns out she homebirths, has a primarily vegan diet, practices co-cleeping (bedsharing), practices elimination communication and does not vaccinate!!! I love this woman! She also breastfeeds exclusively past one year. NO solids for one year.

Tons of celebrities are vegetarian or vegan. A number of celebrities babywear because lets face it, babywearing is very cool. A few celebrities breastfeed past the first few months (and admit it) and a tiny number have homebirths. A few notables don’t vaccinate or use alternative vaccine scheduling. I have never, ever heard of a celebrity mentioning, much less practicing EC. I have never heard of a celebrity breastfeeding exclusively past one year.

Mayik started EC-ing her second child at 2 days old. She talks about elimination communication during her CBB interview:

“The entire concept is not to potty train them, it’s not to do reward and punishment, I don’t clap my hands and say, “Good job.” It’s a very Zen, meditative experience of learning the signals, being able to respond to the signals. The level of communication you can achieve with an infant is really profound.”

Mayim also discusses childbirth with CBB:

“Fred, yes, was born at home, and Miles was able to watch the whole thing from his high chair while eating granola. Fortunately it was a very fast labor because I think Miles would’ve been bored if it was longer than the hour and a half it was. He loves it, he still talks about it.”

In reading other interviews and blogs, I discovered that she obtained her PhD after Blossom ended and she is also is devoutly Jewish (self described cross between Orthodox and Conservative, Conservadox). In fact, one of the reasons she chooses the skirts below the knees and the sleeved tops is for modesty reasons. Unfortunately these explanations were cut from the final version of What Not To Wear and the end, they made her out to be a frumpy mom with no fashion sense rather than an incredibly passionate, highly educated woman who stands up for what she believes in and walks the walk.

According to Allison from Jew in the City who is a personal friend of Mayim’s and also appeared briefly on the What Not to Wear episode :

“In my five seconds of fame, I said something about Mayim Bialik not being a messed up child star and instead raising a family and getting a PhD. All the stuff I mentioned about modesty not having to equal frumpiness and how I (the Orthodox Jew) had been encouraging her (the celebrity) to put herself together and find the perfect balance of cute, confident, and covered, was missing.”

She seems to be moving back into the spotlight again with recent appearances on Bones and Saving Grace. According to her interview at CBB, she is also optioned a set of novels called Rashi’s Daughters that she is working on.

According to Jewcy:

“In the decades since she stopped playing Blossom Russo, Bialik has not sat still. She’s earned a Ph.D. in neuroscience and has undertaken cutting-edge studies at UCLA as one of the top researchers of Prader-Willi Syndrome in the field….She’s also testing the waters of going back into acting, with recent appearances on Curb Your Enthusiasm and Bones. And she’s also in the middle of another big revival: she’s experimenting with being an observant Jew.”

I find that I have so much in common with Mayim’s parenting. We both even had babies born in the caul! Other than the fact that her sons are circumcised , she is hands down the best example of gentle, natural parenting in the public eye that I have ever seen.

Watch the full episode of What Not To Wear featuring Mayim Bialik.

Update: We are no longer offering this item in our store. Please visit us for many other unique natural family living products.

The full product line of the ever popular BabyLegs brand baby leg warmers are now available at A Much Better Store. We have always carried the BabyLegs organics and we have recently increased our availability to offer the full line of these versatile and fun accessories.

BabyLegs are leg warmers for babies that come in a huge assortment of styles and colors to satisfy all parenting types and the pickiest toddlers. They are one size fits all and even teens and adults can use them for sports, arm warmers and more.

They are portable and are easy to bring along in a diaper bag or glove compartment to be prepared for cooler spring or fall days or even cool summer evenings. They also make a great second layer in the winter underneath regular clothes.

They are ideal for elimination communication because they can keep your baby warm during nakey butt time or while using the potty. Bianca wears her BabyLegs around the clock because the vast majority of infant clothing simply makes EC impossible.

Visit A Much Better Store to check out the full line of BabyLegs leg warmers. As always, get these fun, trendy accessories for 10% off as well as the rest of your order, by using code BLOG at checkout.

Bianca is 3 months old today. That was the fastest three months of my life, no question. I am still euphoric from the whole birth experience and it seems like it was yesterday. I hope I can carry that feeling with me for the next three (or thirty) years.

Bianca is still the happiest baby ever and a joy to be around. She loves spending time with all of us. She has started laughing/giggling now which is a delight. She is still just a huge baby and I think she looks/acts closer to six months old.

Brielle is so delicate and Bianca is so plump that believe it or not they can actually wear some of the same clothes. Shirts that are a little too short on Brielle fit Bianca perfectly and Brielle routinely puts on Bianca’s jeans and wears them as capris.

Here are some of my favorite pictures from the latest upload. Sorry so many. OK, I am not really sorry. Seriously, how can I narrow this down? (more…)

There are many misconceptions surrounding elimination communication in general but there are even more surrounding nighttime EC. First of all, any parent who has ever greeted their diapered little one in the morning knows that the diaper is often soaking wet and literally heavy with pee. Babies can and do pee a lot at night. Secondly, if babies are going to pee outside of a diaper, the last place you want them to pee is in your bed (and poo in the bed is unthinkable).

When I was pregnant with Bianca, my older brother was utterly flabbergasted that I planned to let a diaperless baby sleep in bed with me. Although he never asked me about it, I am sure he was picturing both of us covered in poo and laying in puddles off pee. Thankfully, nighttime EC is substantially cleaner than that. (more…)

Yes it’s true. My life revolves around poo. If you would have asked me five years ago if this were possible, I would have laughed in your face. I spent almost 20 years after leaving for college as a child free adult and frankly, poo was the last thing I ever had to worry about. (more…)

In the interest of full disclosure, I want to post about our recent EC setbacks. Not a day after my last post which was chock full of our EC success, our elimination communication took a sharp turn. I have enjoyed six blissful weeks where Bianca was on a six day poo schedule. Seriously, how nice is that? She always held it and we had a 100% catch rate.

A few hours after I published the last post, her poo changed from a mustard or cake icing consistency to a Guinness beer consistency. (Oh come on! All parents know that you have to be able to compare poo to food!!) Anyway, we have had a number of misses. She went from a once every six days schedule to a 2-3 times a day schedule. (more…)