I was at the local library with my kids recently, checking out the periodicals in the children’s reading room when I came across a magazine headline, “To Catch a Pee: A Diaper Free Infancy”. You read that correctly. A Diaper Free Infancy. A toilet training practice known as Elimination Communication. Have you ever heard of this? Let me break it down into Wikipedia terms for you. Elimination communication is a toilet training practice in which a caregiver uses timing, signals, cues, and intuition to address an infant’s need to eliminate waste. Caregivers try to recognize and respond to babies’ bodily needs and enable them to urinate and defecate in an appropriate place (e.g. a toilet). (As if the toilet is not an appropriate place.) I mean, really? A life without diapers sounds great, until you get down to the part where you need to hold your newborn over the toilet every time he makes a face. Have these people not heard of diapers – in the convenient disposable and cloth varieties? Can you imagine trying this with your newborn, when you’ve had 2 hours of sleep in a 48-hour span and still feel like your vagina has been hit by a lawn mower? Sorry, friends. This woman tried cloth diapers at the beginning and then went on to use disposable ones due to a variety of reasons. I understand that EC may be a common practice in other countries where diapers are not a part of their culture. Even if I had won the Lottery the year my son was born, didn’t need to work every day and could pay someone to sleep for me, Elimination Communication would not be my cup of tea. Potty training my first born was a stressful enough time in my life (that I try to block out). Had I tried this, my husband and my dearest friends would have sent me away for their own sanity.