cloth diapers – Rebecca Cuneo Keenan

Ah, firsts.

I remember diligently listening to my doctor’s recommendation to begin introducing Colum to solids with runny rice cereal mixed with breast milk and then to sloooowly introduce one food at a time, looking out for signs of allergies. I bought organic, brown rice cereal and painstakingly expressed fresh milk for each feed.

Irene had a similar start only I had wised up and just kept a bottle of breast milk in the fridge to use for cereal at first. I soon realized that pureed fruit make an excellent baby cereal vehicle too.

Both times I thought long and hard about what and when I would introduce my baby to solids. I looked forward to it. It was a big deal. This time I thought maybe I’d skip the baby cereals altogether since they’re really only so much filler and the iron absorption rate for babies is low. I would probably buy some organic produce and start with that and then move on to meat for iron. And I’d definitely wait until she was fully six months. I thought.

Fast forward to last Saturday. My hand is cramping up from squeezing the manual breast pump for so long and I still only have six ounces of expressed breast milk. That’s actually not a bad, uh, harvest? I just haven’t started pumping early enough to get as much as I wanted. I’m attending a couple sessions of Podcamp Toronto and then meeting some friends for dinner and may be gone as long as six or seven hours. I think about dashing out to Shoppers for some “just in case” formula, but don’t want to spend a lot of money on formula we’ll hardly use and I’m already running late.

“Here’s six ounces of breast milk,” I tell Ed, “Give her two three-ounce feeds and there’s a jar of baby apple sauce and some rice cereal in the cupboard. Feed her a little of that in between to fill her up. It’ll be fine.” And then I leave.

Yep, two ingredients instead of one; non-organic, ultra-processed rice cereal given to me as swag from somewhere; and a jar of organic baby food Santa had put in her stocking for the benefit of her older sibs. Oh, and she’s still two weeks shy of six months. And you know what? It’s fine.

Ed was kind enough to record this milestone for me. Let’s watch together:

She’s saying she wants more, Ed! Why aren’t you listening!? Thanks for having your sister’s back, Colum and Irene.

I’ve continued giving her a little pureed apple at dinner time (which is when she really wants to join in and eat with the rest of us) sans rice cereal. Last night I put some steamed broccoli from our dinner through the baby food mill and she gobbled it up. Interestingly, she had an easier time swallowing the more textured broccoli than the super-smooth jarred apple sauce that sometimes was thrust back out. I think it’s because it’s less like a liquid and therefore less confusing. I really don’t get why babies over five-months old need super thin purees.

The only thing I’m really sad about? Breast milk poop! Oh how I’ll miss that mild-smelling, water-soluble poo. Here comes months of mushy, stinky, real food poo and new adventures in cloth diapering. I’m really going to need a lid for the diaper pail now.

Diapers, More Than Meets The Eye

Okay, it’s time to talk about diapering. I can hear the cheering already.

I used a diaper service (paid for by my mom) for the first few months with Colum and then switched to disposables full-time when my service ran out. (Until we were toilet training, that is. I swear by cloth trainers if you’re not too poo adverse.) With Irene I requested that my mom just buy me some diapers instead, but she really wanted me to have the service for the first couple months. So we picked out a couple dozen larger-sized prefolds at a local store. The problem was that they were too big when the service ended and then I lost all my cloth diapering mojo by the time they did fit. I think I used about half a dozen, one time. Oh god, the guilt still burns.

Pregnant the third time around, I figured there was no point even trying to kid myself. Three kids. There was no way I would be organized enough to pull off cloth this time. I was reading Amalah all summer, of course, since she just had her third kid and I needed to remember how to find the humour in sleep deprivation and spit up-drenched sheets. So, yes, I read her epic posts about cloth diapering with three kids and what works and what doesn’t and saw how cute the bums are with the diapers and the covers and everything. But nah, I wasn’t swayed. My pregnant cohort Emma Willer went out and got some cloth diapers for her third baby and I think I laughed. These women were simply better people than me and I didn’t mind saying so. I was keeping my expectations low this time and I didn’t care how many baby seals they had to club for me to do so. (What’s that? Disposables don’t come from baby seals? Oh, that’s much better.)

Fast forward three months and I’m pretty sure I lost an entire week of my life reading an internet’s worth of wisdom about cloth diapers (and don’t even ask about the Youtube videos). Before I knew it there were diapers arriving in the mail, the word “Snappi” became a regular part of my vernacular and I started cornering defenseless (and often childless) people and forcing folding demonstrations on them. And my poor brother-in-law, Sean, knows more than he ever wanted to about the antibacterial properties of properly lanolized wool. I may need a twelve step program, but at least I haven’t purchased a pack of diapers in a couple months!

I’m not sure exactly how I got from there to here, but I know it has something to do with unearthing a dozen unopened prefolds from the Irene days. I thought maybe I’d sell them or give them away, but the guilt! It burns! Money was pretty tight leading up to Christmas, too, so the idea of washing my own diapers started to shift columns from “time-consuming idealism” to “worth it to save a buck”. And of course all those cloth diaper posts I’d read were rattling around in my subconscious, quietly chipping away at my determination to do everything the easiest way possible. The final straw, however, was when I had to change Mary’s entire outfit — undershirt and all — THREE TIMES in one afternoon because of poo squishing up her back. This does not happen with cloth diapers; it just doesn’t. The poo might ooze a bit around the legs and they clearly can’t compete with disposables in terms of pure volume of pee containment, but you won’t have to deal with poo exploding up the your infants back over and over again. Screw this noise, I thought, and stuffed a giant prefold into small-sized Bummi wrap and called it a day.

Right then. Since this prelude to a small post about cloth diapering has become a long post unto itself, I’m going to have to hit you with a cliff hanger here. More details about what, how and why I cloth diaper will follow later this week. Can you even wait?!

Oh god, at this rate I won’t have any readers left by the end of the month.