she was a bit tipsy and floppy so we always sat with her while she was on the pot
here she is at 7 months poised and elegant on her pink throne
around 8 or 9 months she sometimes got bored and cranky on the potty so we tied some toys on ribbons next to it and tried to make it exciting and interesting for her. Here she is at 10 months with her wind up music horse.
We started putting our baby on the potty when she was 4 months old. I didn’t plan to do this but one day I found a Baby Bjorn potty at the end of our neighbors driveway so I brought it home, cleaned it up and typed these words into google “4 month old using potty?” I got search results for something called “Elimination Communication”. You can go down a pretty deep rabbit hole of fanatical potty training opinion when you begin researching this stuff so I’ll summarize for you. Yes it’s totally possible to teach an infant to use the potty. No you don’t need to wait until the baby “shows signs of toilet readiness”, No you don’t have to be a hardcore cloth diapering mother to begin using this amazing technique! The guidelines are actually incredibly simple. You just plop them onto the potty at advantageous moments and see what happens.
WAKE AND PISS: Babies have an innate tendency to pee right after they wake up so as soon as your baby wakes up either first thing in the morning or immediately after a nap take their diaper off and place them on the potty. Chances are pretty good that that pee will come out.
THE LET DOWN RELEX: babies apparently have a reflexive urge to pee when they are put down after being carried for a while. So if you’ve had the baby in a carrier for a while, try plopping them directly onto the potty when you are ready to put them down. Chances are good that pee will come out.
MAKE IT FUN: My baby was quite delighted to have her own little chair to sit upright in. She couldn’t sit up yet on her own when we started using the potty so the experience of being supported by a chair in an upright position was completely novel and fun for her. Because she enjoyed sitting on the potty it was never a battle of wills or an unpleasant experience putting her on there!
SOUND CUES: make a peeing sound with your lips (psshhhh) when you put them on the potty. When they randomly begin to pee make that sound and say encouraging things to let them know that peeing on the potty is excellent! My baby always thought I was very funny when I did this, she would slump like a little old fat man on her potty-throne and giggle at me while she peed and I “psshhhhd”.
SOUND CUES: Put a bit of water in the bottom of the potty bowl so that when they pee they can hear a sound as it hits the water. This also helps you to know that they’re peeing as it’s not always obvious. If the baby poops on the potty the water prevents the poop from sticking quite so much which makes it easier to clean out the potty afterwards.
REPETITION & OBSERVATION: If you put your baby on the potty multiple times a day the chances are very good that your child will pee or poop on the potty at least one of those times. The more times you do this, the more the baby starts to associate peeing and pooping with this neat experience of sitting upright on a cool chair. As you go along you may start to observe certain predictable clues in your babies behavior that tell you they are about to pee or poop. My baby always gets a very focused, intent look on her face when she needs to poop. If I notice her starting to look glassy eyed or like her mind has wandered far away I scoop her up and run for the potty. My sister-in law told me that her older son always twirled one ankle when he needed to poop. You’ll learn to spot your own babies cues with time.
POOP CHANGES: This section is a bit gross!!!
This is just an interesting side note for moms who, like me, were surprised to see the consistency/color/regularity of baby poop changing between months 4-7. The changes were made even more evident to me because my kid was pooping on a potty into water so her turds held their shape instead of getting all smooshed up between her butt cheeks. I’m sure this will be too gross for many people but I found it very interesting, to see the effect on my babies digestion as she moved from a milk only diet to slowly incorporating solid foods. In the beginning her poo was bright curry paste yellow and sort of creamy. Over time it began to darken in color but the consistency remained the same. On the days after I had given her solid foods her poop was more solid, whereas on days when I had mostly breastfed her her poops returned to being soft and mushy. The most interesting poop so far was the one she made on the day after her grandmother fed her a piece of Croissant. She hadn’t ever eaten anything made from white flour before and her poop was like a hard black log floating in the potty the next day!
