After a long and arduous fight with our online comment system, I was able to pick a winner. So many of the comments were amazing that I just had to pick a random winner, and that winner is Tessa! Hooray for Tessa, and thanks everyone for commenting.
This is the third post in a series about elimination communication. But I would be remiss if I didn’t make sure you read my buddy Liz’s amazing post from yesterday, “I’ve got your back.” I feel like a chump moving it down the page because, really, it’s the kind of thing every parent in the world should have to read before getting out of bed every morning. So please, even if you’re just here for the giveaway, give it a read. You’ll be glad you did.
As a parent, I struggle with finding the line between having the stuff that makes life easier and just plain having too much stuff. There are only 10,000 products that every business from here to the moon wants to sell you to reportedly make your life easier or make your child smarter/cooler/great taste, less filling. I definitely had the experience of scanning too many items with my registry gun just because the impending fear of having a baby made some ridiculous product seem completely reasonable.
Then there are those things that actually do make your life easier. We have the kind of cloth diapers with one zillion snaps, and there have been more than a few times I have uttered profanities trying to get them off so I could take Teddy to the potty and then back on again.Yes, I could just let him go without a diaper, which we often do, but sometimes you’re just not in the mood for washing that blanket the thousandth time, you know?
Enter Ecapants. They were created by a mom to solve just this problem, and they are dead clever. They sort of look like little super hero underwear – part diaper, part undies. A little elastic band keeps them around your baby’s waist while the front un-velcros down in a big flap that just velcros back on again when you’re done using the potty. Easy! I wanted to try them out, so Ecaware baby owner Lisa sent me a pair to review and generously offered to give one lucky reader a pair of their own.
Ecaware baby’s website has great photos and a diagram to show you how they work.
Ecapants have a little bit of absorbency, so if you miss a pee, no biggie. But they’re not a diaper, so they still keep you on your toes like tiny underwear or going pantsless. They’re the kind of thing that make me want to do EC because they just make it easier, and that’s something very valuable to me. Like I’ve mentioned in previous posts, EC is a lot of work – valuable, worth-my-time work, but work.
Something that I love about them is that the velcro tabs reach backward, rather than forward, like most velcro-style diapers. It makes them way easier to put on because the back part of the pants are already held in place by the elastic band around the waist.
My husband and I have already agreed to put a few pairs of Ecapants in our budget for next month. They come in a bunch of colors and styles – snaps or velcro, cotton or waterproof. I hope someday to be able to use the for our nighttime EC, but right now, I’m not good enough at catching nighttime pee to brave them. But someday, they will make my nighttime routine much simpler, and I will chuckle at my former self, fumbling over snaps in the semi-darkness while barely awake.
Now, for the giveaway details. Again, Lisa has generously offered to giveaway a pair of Ecapants – any style you like and the size you need – to a lucky reader. What do you have to do? Two things.
1) “Like” the Ecaware baby facebook page.
2) Leave a comment here on your thoughts on EC, Ecapants, diapers, pee, poop, parenting, etc.
You have to do both things to win, and you have until Monday, July 23rd at 5 p.m. CST to do them. Instead of randomly selecting a winner, a winner will be chosen based on the quality of their comment. Say something thoughtful, and it may earn you a pair of tiny flap pants.
And if you missed it, here’s my first post about our family’s experience with elimination communication and a review of Mayim Bialik’s book, Beyond the Sling.