Real Life EC: 12th Month

The final month of our first year is here! Incredible! It is really hard to believe that this wonderful little guy has only been a part of my life for a single year. On the other-hand, time has really flown by. This month's post covers the last month of Alek's first year, turning 1 year old on Dec. 20, 2018. Right smack in the middle of the busy holiday season, so I will keep this post short.

​Alek went from timidly walking to running in the last month. And climbing. He is so tall now that it seems nothing is out of reach. With walking has come a huge surge in his ability to communicate; he chatters all the time and gets better every day at telling us (with pointing and little noises) exactly what he wants. In terms of EC, there was a turning point about a week before his birthday. That Friday, I had a very busy day out of the house with both kids, including a trip to the doctor, a couple of car rides, a bus and LRT ride, lunch while out, shopping and a trip to the museum. The only miss was on the way to the doctor's office. Our success that day was unexpected and totally surprising! The next several days were more of the same, very busy days, even parties in the evening, and only a couple of wet diapers for the entire day. It felt like we were in a really good groove. He still wasn't signalling for the most part, (perhaps a lazy attempt at the potty sign a couple times), but he was certainly holding his pee, knowing that I would take him to the potty in due time. 

​Oh! And that amazing week happened while he was cutting 8 teeth! This kid never ceases to amaze me. I also brought out his big Baby Bjorn potty, and took the little green IKEA one out of the living space since he was totally adverse to using it. On the larger potty I have about a 50-50 success rate, so I end up taking him to the bathroom sink or toilet a lot of the time anyway, but I am hoping that he will warm up to it soon.

A really big change this month has been that I have started to give him water more consistently during the day with his meals. His poops had often become quite hard and pebble-like, and adding more water and more smoothies seems to be helping them to return to a healthier consistency. The downside is that it makes timing his pees a lot more difficult. For next month it will definitely be worth doing some focused diaper-free time after meals (with water) to get a better handle on his timing and frequency of peeing then. 

In the last week of the month when EC was going really well, I started using training pants with cotton pants over them while we were at home. It was really wonderful and the pants were great at keeping him warm while also absorbing some of the pee when we had a miss so that it didn't end up on the floor. Getting more training pants for home-use is definitely on my to-do list as well!