Before my son was born, I had such high aspirations. I was going to be such a great mother. My baby would wear cloth diapers, he would eat food that I lovingly cooked and pureed for him, and he would poop on the toilet like my friend Cara's babies did from the age of 6 weeks. I would be a patient and loving mother, a paragon of calmness, never raising my voice or losing my temper. I would breast-feed with ease, and my baby would always feel secure and confident. I would be the parent I'd always wished I'd had, never sending my baby any mixed messages or hesitating for a second to do exactly the right thing at the right time.

Now that I am the perpetually-tired mother of a 10 month old who has yet to sleep through the night, my aspirations have taken a back seat to my reality. My baby refused to eat my carefully prepared food, in fact refused all solids until well past 9 months of age. And following 7 months of teething, his teeth are just beginning to emerge, and his sleep is as broken as it was when he was a newborn. When it comes to meals, half of the time I just toss a handful of cereal flakes and a few raisins on the table in front of him, and consider it a job well done if he eats a couple of bites. (They are organic, after all).

I yell at my husband, I complain when the baby wakes up for yet another feed in the night, and I continue to have the occasional blocked duct and painful engorgement - thank goodness mastitis is a distant memory. Indeed, I've fallen far short of the calm, confidence-inducing paragon of maternal perfection that I envisioned for myself. However, my son does all his poops on the toilet, and a good deal of his pees. And it's not because I spent an inordinate amount of my very limited energy on convincing him to.

Truthfully, he refused to let me put him on the toilet when he was new. So I didn't even revisit the issue until this summer when talking with another mother, Sara. She started telling me about EC.

EC, if you've never heard of it before, is Elimination Communication. EC is a fancy name given to the usual practice in other countries of not wasting natural resources on something your baby is going to pee and poop into. Mothers in some other parts of the world will pay attention to their babies' rhythms and ways, soon coming to understand when their newborn infants need to eliminate. They then hold them over a ditch/ latrine/ trench/ potty/ toilet/ empty bowl etc. This is also called 'Natural Infant Hygiene', (although the only person I've heard of calling it that is the person who wrote the book 'Natural Infant Hygiene', and she kind of made me feel that since I don't have an organic farm and don't live an ultra pure life, there's no hope for me).

To me, EC is simply the practice of allowing yourself to become aware of when your infant or toddler needs to eliminate, and inviting them to do so on the potty or the toilet.

This actually was a very natural thing for my husband and me to do for two reasons. The first is that we'd always been very aware of when our son was going to poop. When he was a brand new baby, he'd make a very specific face shortly before he began. He still makes that same face. I plan to tease him about that face when he is a teenager. The second is that when my husband would change our son's diapers, he'd always say to him "Would you like to do some peeing?" hoping to defuse the fountain before opening up the diaper. It was my husband that told me he could tell when the baby was peeing because of the look of concentration on his face.

We started to offer our son the opportunity to use the toilet when he was about 6 months old. Although we are by no means fulltime EC-ers with an aim to getting our son out of diapers and into baby briefs, we have settled into a routine that seems to catch quite a few of his pees, and pretty much all of his poops.

When our boy wakes up in the morning, we ask him if he'd like to go potty while simultaneously using the ASL baby sign for potty. We also offer him the opportunity to use the potty after a meal or nursing, before going out, and after coming home, and after any naps. He always pees when put on the toilet, but judging from how heavy his diapers are when we change him, he still seems to pee once every fifteen minutes or so. Although he understood quickly that the toilet is a place to pee, he has no interest in holding it until he is given the chance. We don't go without a diaper, and the diaper is rarely dry when it comes time for a change. Some fulltime EC-ers have dry diapers with such consistency that they move to training pants and then little itty-bitty baby underwear.

For me, it's not about rushing our son to being potty trained, but about him communicating with me what is going on with him, and with me trusting my instincts with regards to him. I think my son feels like I am paying attention to him and his needs, and indeed seems quite delighted when I put him on the toilet when he needs to go.

My husband sometimes worries that we are putting pressure on him to do something he might not want to do, and we both feel it's very important to listen to him when he says he's just not in the mood to go on the toilet. And because I don't want him to feel like he needs to do so to please me, I don't praise him when he successfully eliminates on the toilet, nor do I castigate when he goes in his diaper. Instead I say to him: "You must feel so much better now that you've emptied your bladder' or 'You must feel so much better now that you've gotten that out of your system.' I don't know if this has anything to do with EC, but perhaps gives some insight into my own philosophy and neuroses.

Not having to clean poop out of cloth diapers is a nice little side bonus for me.

If you are interested in find out more about EC, you can check out 'Diaper Free: The Gentle Wisdom of Natural Infant Hygiene' by Ingrid Bauer, or 'The Diaper Free Baby' by Christine Gross-Loh. There are also a lot of website you might find helpful if you google 'Elimination Communication', such as: www.diaperfreebaby.org. As with all other facets of parenting, EC is probably not a one-size-fits-all thing. Your baby will tell you how much - if any - EC they are comfortable with.