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.