Toilet Learning Twins - Part 1 - Our Beginning

As I've planned out how I would cover our toileting journey, I realised there is more and more information I want to add. To ensure this flows and so you have some context to make sense of our journey I have divided this into different parts and will link each section as they are posted.

• Toileting Pre-reading  - posted here
• Part 1 - Our beginning - posted
• Part 2 - Cloth nappies - posted here
• Part 3 - Training pants - posted here
• Part 4 - Prepared Environment for toileting  - posted here

Background

I came across Montessori when G started crawling and I wondered how I was going to survive two moving babies. I had heard of Montessori before, but I thought it was aimed only at the 3+ age group. Since discovering Montessori I have made changes around the home which I know have made life at home easier. In terms of toileting, I always planned on cloth. I was a cloth baby, if cloth was good enough for me, why not my children? What I didn't know at the time was how much the cloth nappy market had evolved. Talk about information over load!


To give you some background, when I found out were having twins we were ecstatic. Getting pregnant wasn't easy for us. It was a 5 year lon g journey, with two miscarriages, a river of tears, much heart break, medical intervention (IUI & IVF), a dismal IVF cycle, dark moments of despair  and the growing fear that our infertility could be unexplained and long term. It is an experience that has shaped my thinking in terms of how I want to parent.

Me with baby G, at two weeks.

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So how is this all related to our toilet journey? A child is always a bless, and two in one pregnancy is a gift. Multiple pregnancies are physically, emotionally, and mentally demanding. My focus throughout my pregnancy was to make it to full term. A full term twin delivery would mean both babies would come home with me when we left the hospital. No special care or neonatal intensive care. I researched and read everything I could on multiple pregnancies, and raising twins and more (especially in terms of sleeping and routines.) If you are a parent of multiples you may well understand my frame of mind. Oh, how almost obsessive I was about been informed and educated on sleeping, feeding and routines. 

I laugh now, not once did it occur to me to read any material unrelated to multiples, sleep and routines. The books I could have read! Once the girls arrived at 37 weeks and 3 days, and we left the hospital we were well into survival mode, focused on the next feed, next sleep, nappy changes, and just getting through the day and weeks with a lot less sleep.

If I knew then, what I know now, what subjects would I have researched related to toileting?

• Montessori - Especially for infants.
• Elimination Communication (ECing)

I'm not sure if we would have committed to full time ECing with twins. I imagine it is a lot easier to observe and watch for ques from one baby, than it is from two.  I'm just hazarding a guess on that one. If, I'm lucky enough to have another child and it is a singleton child I would definitely like to practise full time ECing. As it is, I would say our toileting could be called, accidental part time ECing.

So our beginnings in toileting, starts not at birth, but much later, probably between three and seven months, when we bounced between cloth nappies, disposable nappies and nappy free time. Luckily, Brisbane has a lovely, warm climate for most of the year. A climate suited for nappy free time, thus our toileting journey begins with nappy free time, morphs into cloth nappies, and now actively using the potty for toileting, this time with a lot more knowledge than we started with.

In my next toileting post I will be covering cloth nappies.

Should you be interested here are a few more resources to read..

Happy reading.

• Website : Link to daily Montessori and toilet learning here
• Website : Tribal Baby and the FREE EBOOK available via Tribal Baby
• Books : Some books in relation to toileting that I borrowed from my local public library.