not that anyone wanted to hear about this
...but a coworker of Mer's was in a picture recently that had this book prominently displayed.
She also found this review somewhere (emphasis mine):
This infant training method involves establishing signals between mother and infant for elimination. At first, the mother simply predicts or observes when the infant is eliminating, and holds the child in a specific position while making a specific sound. Within hours or days even a newborn infant becomes aware of the position and sound and begins to eliminate on cue. Soon it begins to signal to the mother when it is about to eliminate so that she can hold it in position over the pot. As the infant gets old enough to move around on its own, it will crawl to the pot of its own accord when it needs to go, and by the time the child is walking, the child is already trained, without tears, arguments or battles.
1) Feng shui knows when you have to take a shit.
2) Ah yes, the brown note. So handy. So full of comic potential.
And there are other reviews:
Whether you are interested in the history of infant hygiene (ie: life before diapers), infant life and hygiene in other cultures, or how to go about living a diaper free life, this is the book for you!
Jam packed with information and pictures, this book can help you and your baby go diaperless, or at the very least communicate better.
Whew! The soaring plotlines and page-turning action of the history of infant hygeine!
Or how about this?
Ingrid's own experiences helped encourage me to try this with our own son, with astounding success... our son is out of diapers, but more importantly we are continually communicating about his needs and providing response to his inborn instinct not to soil himself.
Speaking of which: I've made it my life's work to find a particularly disturbing program that was shown at 3AM on French TV. I think it was a British show (go figure) translated into French.
Maybe I should explain.
Mer and I were taking a hiking tour throughout the south of France, and we'd just landed in Avignon and had found our bizarre motel-6-looking hotel immediately off the freeway.
When we got to our room, we could see immediately that we needed to buy a lot more heroin in our lives. The toilet sat inside the shower stall, which was a self-contained room off to one side. Every available wall in the room was painted matte black. The furniture hadn't been changed since about 1985. There was a small TV bolted to the ceiling. And the whole room was about 5x5. We tried to go to sleep, but we were severely jet-lagged; so while the world went on outside, we spent 4 in the morning in our room watching TV.
I think both of us would've preferred to have been high at that moment. Or at least drunk. Because what came on the TV defies description.
It was a series of babies against solid color backgrounds, doing various things with turds. Some turds were in toy toilets, some were just out on the ground, and some turds were ice cream designed to look like turds. There were static shots (without babies) of turds just sitting there with large bugs crawling on and through them. Babies were playing with the turds. And then there were shots of babies eating the turds. It still disturbs me to say that we couldn't immediately tell whether the turds the babies were eating were fake or real. All throughout, there was a female announcer, the sort you'd find during inflight announcements or the computers on Star Trek, calmly and brightly saying things we couldn't understand, under the French dubbing, which we also didn't understand.
The experience was indelible for both of us. I think I have to find tape of this just to be able to excise it from my life. Or at least inflict it on others, because it's just too bizarre not to make some attempt at finding it.
I made an attempt just now but only succeeded in finding this site. It's a very long, hard, and ropy heart of darkness I'm traveling, my friends.