- Can you potty train your infant?
I started at four months
because there's so much other things you're trying to do.
And I wish that I had started sooner.
- Hey guys, my name is Shayla.
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This video is, can you potty train your infant?
What?
I am not an expert in this.
In fact, I failed at it for like a long time.
And now I'm finally getting the hang of it enough
to share my experience with you.
I will give you resources where you can get
the actual knowledge and how to do this,
if you want to do it.
But I want to share with you what I did,
how I did it wrong things, that I needed,
all things that I learned
and then some tips that I have from my experience with it.
So I'm going to start with...
My babysitter's downstairs, I'm a little self-conscious
about making these videos.
So I don't even know what to say to her.
I just hope that she can't really hear me.
Anyway, also, you probably can't tell
but we bought a new King size bed.
Oh my gosh.
And I just...
Why does it look so terrible?
Well, that's here.
This is a pillow.
Maybe I'll just move that pillow.
I feel like I'm a real adult
now that I have a King size bed.
I have a babysitter, I'm like, I have a babysitter.
I just haven't really fully wrapped my mind around
that I'm like a mother.
We just bought a house.
I feel like you're one way or the other,
like you either graduated and you were like,
I'm an adult now or you're constantly like, wait,
I'm an adult?
Not that I don't do my responsibilities.
Anyway, let's get started.
Can you potty train your infant?
Some cultures, probably not very many
don't have diapers or don't use diapers.
It's just normal that you would potty train your infant.
Before I switched the channel over to a mommy channel,
I was like a full-time travel channel.
So to me, it's like cultural.
I would say that we have not potty trained
but she definitely understands what the potty is.
So we're not, they call it catches.
We're not catching every time she goes to the bathroom
but she knows that when she sits down, she knows what to do.
And if she has to go, she goes and if she doesn't,
she doesn't.
And I used to sit there with her forever.
Like, okay, come on, you got to go, you got to go.
And now if she has to go, she goes and she's off.
If she doesn't go right away, I just take her off
because they know that she doesn't have to.
Does that make sense?
Resources that I want to give you are this book,
"Go Diaper Free."
And she also has a podcast.
So if you are into this,
start listening to the podcast to get to the information.
It is awesome.
It just explains to you what you need to know to do it.
You can start this like day one of your child being born.
I started in the four month sleep progression
and that week was just weak.
I was tired plus I was like, yeah, let's try and do this
like potty training thing.
I just gave up, I literally was like, forget it.
And then I have people following me, messaging me like,
oh my gosh, thank you so much
for telling me about elimination communication
which is what this whole thing is called.
My baby's doing it, we're catching a couple eliminations
a day.
What, what?
Seth started trying again?
Because Seth was the one that was super adamant.
And I feel like a lot of the men are the ones that are like,
yeah let's get our baby potty trained
'cause they don't want to deal with diapers.
Seth started doing it again and I was like, yeah, okay,
let's try it again.
And we tried it again probably about six or seven months
and now she gets it.
Let me keep going.
So I am an affiliate with them.
So they gave to me, yeah, potty.
That's where she potties.
I need disinfectant wipes.
And I wipe out the seat whenever she goes
because sometimes she gets a hold of it
and I'm not trying to have her put it in her mouth.
It's all sorts of weird stuff so.
They also have these, they're called tiny undies
and that's exactly what they are.
And they're so freaking cute, but they're padded.
There's like a little panel,
it goes all the way to here, all the way to the front.
These are trying to figure out your baby's cues
for when they have to go to the bathroom.
I also got this one.
But I prefer this because as you can see when it's wet
this one is harder to see when it's wet
but you sit with your baby and try and figure out
their cues for when they have to go.
I failed at that.
I will talk about that more in a second.
Those are the things that I'd recommend in the book.
The potty, and then you can buy a potty hat.
We have one, but I couldn't find it,
I think it's in the wash.
It's just this like material that goes around the top
so she's not just sitting in the plastic
but she doesn't care about the plastic anymore.
We also do cloth diapering.
And I think that the pairing of cloth diapering
and EC is perfect.
I think that sitting in a wet diaper
helps them understand faster that like,
this is uncomfortable.
Whereas with disposables, it pulls it away so quickly
that who cares if they pee in their diaper.
So I like the combination of the two.
I have a whole video on cloth diapering
and how we do like an 80, 20 clock diaper
disposable diapers at night kind of thing.
With cloth diapering, when they're exclusively breastfeeding
you can just throw in the washing machine
because their breast milk poop is water soluble.
If they're doing formula or solids, it is not
so you need to spray it off and then put it in the wash.
Bought a hose, t's like bidet,
where you spray off the diaper when it gets pooped on,
that's what I use when she poops in her potty,
I spray out the poop.
So it's kind of actually really handy.
I know somebody else who uses their peri bottle.
So like that works just fine.
Here's how my experience happened.
I started at four months
because there's so much other things you're trying to do.
And I wish that I had started sooner.
In my defense, she was mobile so early.
So I'd sit her on it and she would try and crawl off.
How am I supposed to do this?
So I'm trying to figure out her signals
and I'm trying to put her on the potty
and she's just crawling off.
Yeah, yeah.
Then I started doing transition times
and transition times were like, after she wakes up
in the morning, after she wakes up from a nap,
after we get out of the car seat,
after she eats in her high chair
like times where she's not going to want to go,
like they don't want to go
when they're in a car seat like that.
I almost catch every single morning from her.
And even if her diapers wet, I still put her on it to try.
And I've caught a lot like that as well.
And then you can tell when she's like ranting
or when she's like bearing down a little bit,
let's go get the potty and then I'll get the potty.
It's been so nice because I haven't had to clean
as many poopy diapers now.
I catch almost, I'd say almost all of her poops.
Before I was doing like one dirty diaper a day maybe,
now I'll do, I don't know, one a week
maybe one or two a week.
So what we started doing was we'd put her on it
and we go like this, which is toilet.
And we're like, okay, go toilet, go potty,
we'll grunt, we'll be like (grunts)
So now when she sits on the potty,
she'll just go (grunts)
and you could see your stomach working (grunts).
(baby grunts)
And that's when she makes that sound off the potty,
I know that she needs to be on the potty.
That's what we've been doing.
So I catch almost all of her morning ones.
And then after her second nap, I'll usually catch something
and then it's kind of hit or miss for the rest of the day.
That's okay, the whole point is that she understands
that this is what you do when you're sitting on the potty.
From what the book says,
you don't need to catch all of them.
I mean, you just need to catch some of them.
Some people are concerned, like, can my kids go to daycare?
What if I do it part-time?
Yeah, you can do all of that.
It's just the association with the potty to go.
I'm only a couple of months in
so maybe I'll watch this in a year and I'm like, no girl.
She went through like a couple of days
where she didn't sleep very well.
And I think it was just like,
honestly, I think it was a slow regression,
which you look up like six month sleep regression
Shayla, there's one, seven months sleep regression.
Yap, eight months of regression, yeah.
You can find a sleep regression for any age
that your child is in.
Somebody was like, you should try cutting out caffeine.
I think it's just a blip.
I don't think that...
I don't think that I need to cut caffeine
but I'm giving it a go.
So we're like three days in,
we're just drinking decaf and water.
Here are my final thoughts on EC.
Andrea says not to praise her.
So not to say, oh, good job.
You can say, yay!
Or you can say, does that feel better to go in the potty?
Observe and comment on what's happening
but not to say good job implying that there is a bad job.
The whole point is having her want to do it
instead of having her do it, because I want her to do it.
'Cause that was one con that somebody DMed me about.
They can like hold it, and that can be really bad for them.
She now poops probably every other day.
And I keep track of it just to make sure
that this doesn't happen.
Sometimes I say, still say, good girl
I'm working on saying something else.
And I'll probably when we move in like a month and a half
I'm going to do some blogs about that too.
I'm probably going to start pottying her,
setting her potty on the toilet
so that she kind of understands
that this is where you do this.
And I feel like that could be a good transition time
when we moved to the new house.
It also might be a time where she's like,
forget it, this is too stressful,
I'm not doing this anymore.
So we'll see.
I'm curious to see how this progresses with potty training.
Those are like my resources, my items,
my experience with it.
I'm really happy that we started and that we failed
and that we went back to it.
I'm glad that we tried again.
I'll keep you posted on how it goes.
So maybe I'll do another update in like six months
or something.
Just to kind of tell you how it's going.
If you want to follow me on Instagram,
sometimes I talk about there.
Sometimes I don't, because I don't know if people
want to hear about my kids bathroom going.
Anyway, thank you guys so much for watching,
I hope this was helpful.
Please subscribe, please like,
and I will see you next time, bye.