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Tag Archives: cloth diapers

I Bet No One Has Ever Had THIS Diaper Problem Before

06 Sunday May 2012

Posted by IfByYes in Life and Love

≈ 24 Comments

Tags

babies, child care, child development, cloth diapers, diapers, disposable diapers, health, toddlers

Our baby has no bum.

When rear ends were being handed out, Owl was at the back of the line, or possibly not even in the building. I sometimes wonder whether the reason he hovers in the 10th percentile is simply because other babies have bums.

Normally, we don’t really notice our child’s complete lack of buttocks. His cloth diapers are thick and bulky, and they hold his pants up very well, while also providing a nice cushion for landing on.

^artificial bum

But when we travel, and we put him in disposables, we REALLY NOTICE. First of all, when he topples over he is much more likely to cry, as there is very little padding to protect his wee tail bone. Secondly, his pants DON’T STAY ON.

It’s really quite ridiculous. We had to pin all of his pants at the waist to keep them on when we went home for Christmas, and my mother in law had to actually hem and alter the pants on his little suit that my mother gave him – it was a 12 month size and he was 15 months old but WE HAD TO ALTER HIS PANTS.

Altered pants: STILL TOO BIG

Even then, the pants didn’t stay on well.

When Owl is in disposables, even the pants that are normally too snug on him hang down until he looks like a little gangster.

Owl in disposables

There’s simply no way to keep them on, because he has no waist for them to hang on. His body tapers from the shoulders like a carrot.

and this is in a swim diaper, which is still pretty bulky

But we never considered that we might actually be causing his bum deficiency.

We were shown the error of our ways by the Helper Lady at Owl’s daycare.

I picked Owl up a couple of days ago and found him wearing a disposable diaper.

“Helper Lady put him in that, and I didn’t have the energy to argue with her,” said Daycare Lady. “She asked me to pass on a message to you, because her English isn’t good enough for her to explain it to you in person.”

“Oh?”

“She thinks that his cloth diapers are the cause of his diaper rash.”

“You mean the diaper rash that started when we tried using wet wipes on him, and that has been clearing up ever since we went back to cotton wipes and water?”

“Yes. It’s looking a lot better. Um, she also wanted me to tell you that she thinks that the cloth diapers are constricting his bottom, and that’s why it’s so small.”

“…what?”

“She thinks that they don’t breathe properly, and they are snug on him, and that’s keeping his bottom from growing as fast as his top part…”

Guess who has two thumbs and a corset on his bum? THIS BABY

“…REALLY?”

“You’re lucky she doesn’t speak English! She used to be a high school teacher! She’s very DEFINITE about her views!”

I brought Owl back to daycare in a cloth diaper the next day anyway, but if anyone knows a website where I can find information about the risks of disposable diapers or the benefits of cloth diapers in Farsi, I’d greatly appreciate it.

Meanwhile, I need to think about warning Happy Nappy about this unanticipated effect of their diapers on infant bum development.

Because apparently baby bums are like goldfish: they only grow if given a roomy enough container.

WHO KNEW?

Speaking of Poop: Another Disposable Diaper Rant

05 Tuesday Jul 2011

Posted by IfByYes in How is Babby Formed?, I'm Sure This Happens To Everyone...

≈ 24 Comments

Tags

babies, baby poop, cloth diapers, diaper leaks, diapers, disposable diapers, parenting, travel

I’ve been meaning to write this for a while. We’ll see if I can do it with this puppy tied to me, alternately chewing on her bully bone and yelping in my ear.

When we went to Nova Scotia I gave disposable diapers another chance.

I put my cloth diaper service, Happy Nappy, on hold while I was gone and went off to the plane with some disposables left over from a diaper cake that I received when Babby was born.

By the time we landed in NS, Babby had had three clothing changes. The first happened in the airport, because when we arrived we discovered that he was already soaked in urine. This turned out not to be the diaper’s fault. PH, bleary eyed at five in the morning, diapering Babby in the dark, and unaccustomed to disposables, had accidentally put the diaper on backwards.

Kind of thing that could happen to anyone, I’m sure.

So we put a new diaper on, frontwards, and dressed Babby in dry clothes.

Half way to Toronto I discovered that Babby’s back was covered in poo. I did a full diaper change (which was not a ton of fun in a airplane washroom) and washed all the poop off of Babby’s back, and dressed him in yet another set of clothes.

The next couple of diaper changes were just pee, so they were fine.

Then, not half an hour before landing in Halifax, I went to change Babby’s diaper and discovered… you guessed it… poop up his back. 

Another set of clothes. Good thing I came prepared.

The poop-up-the-back scenario repeated itself on a nearly daily basis during my time in NS. I tried a couple of different brands, to no avail.

The most dramatic event happened while I was in Halifax for the day. I planned to visit Hodgepodge, then visit Perfect Girlfriend at her work, visit my old coworkers at my old work, and then have dinner with my cousins.

So there I am, hanging out with Hodgepodge, while Babby plays with the world of toys in her play room and squeals delightedly at the kids around him. He pushes himself to sitting from his stomach for the first time while we chat, and I am very proud of him. He starts to fuss so I pick him up and nurse him. When he finishes I sit him up, and realize that there is poo on my hand.

The poo, I quickly discover, came from under his shirt. I lift the back of his shirt and discover that it is all up his back – again – and now it is on my hands. I swear, lift him up, and realize that there is poo on my pants, where he lay as he nursed. On, and on my shirt, as well. Oh, and on my cell phone. 

This is, by no means, the worst poop incident I have ever dealt with. I said before Babby was born that after dealing with dogs, no poop would faze me, and I stick by that assertion. But on the other hand, I do object to being on a day trip to the big city only to discover that I am covered in poop from head to toe, and realize that while I brought changes of clothes for Babby I brought none for myself.

Did I mention that the poop was a bright Babby-had-scrambled-eggs-for-breakfast yellow? With that squirty, squishy consistency of a still heavily breastfed baby?

Hodgepodge, who runs a day home, was completely unfazed and helped me clean Babby and myself up as much as possible. My pants were dark, so once wiped the poop stain wasn’t particularly prominent. But my blue shirt did not merge well with baby poop stains.

So now I had a clean baby, cleanlooking pants, a cell phone that only had some minor yellow poop drying in the cracks, and two prominent yellow poop stains on my shirt – one over my boob and one over my stomach.

Grand.

Hodgepodge raided her closets and found me a baggy white t-shirt to change into, which I did gratefully. Now that the postal strike is over I need to get my mother to mail that shirt back to her.

I then left to go visit my coworkers and my best friend in a baggy white t-shirt. While at the mall I bought a new shirt just so I could go to dinner with my cousins without feeling like someone who was pooped on that morning.

Disposables? SUCK.

The next time we ran low on diapers, Perfect Husband brought home some Huggies, which advertised “leak-lock” technology. And you know what? After that, we didn’t have any more poop squirting up Babby’s back.

…It came down the legs, instead.

At least this outfit didn’t get poop stained until AFTER the service!

Two More Daycares (I think I’m in love)

22 Wednesday Jun 2011

Posted by IfByYes in How is Babby Formed?, My Blag is on the Interwebs

≈ 28 Comments

Tags

baby sign, child care, cloth diapers, daycare, jobs, parenting

Well, our anniversary was a fiasco.

I was stressed out from another day of visiting daycares and fruitless job searching. The mix-cd I had carefully compiled for PH wouldn’t burn. I ran late trying to get the gift to burn and ended up running around like a chicken with my head cut off, trying to gather stuff for the sitter, and totally forgot a bunch of stuff.

So I picked PH up from work late, anxious, frustrated, and with no present in hand and worse, with no sleepy suit or sea horse for the sitter.

PH had clearly had a bad day at work. He didn’t want to talk about it. My stress levels were through the roof. I didn’t want to talk about it. We kept accidentally ticking each other off and having to apologize.

The movie was awful (Mr. Popper’s Penguins. It had some good lines and was cute enough that I could almost have forgiven it for having nothing in common with the book… except for the repeated penguin-poop joke scenes. I observed to PH that some guy must have gone home at the end of a long work day day and when his wife asked him what he had done that day, he would have said “I created CGI poop gushing out of a CGI penguin’s cloaca.”) and when we got back to our friend’s house we learned that Babby had been screaming pretty much the whole time and had refused to eat or even drink his milk.

They were hanging out with him outside because he didn’t scream outside.

All in all? It turns out that weekday anniversary celebrations leave much to be desired. So we’re going to try again on the weekend.

Now, as for daycare, I think I have some good news… but I want to hear your opinion.

Daycare Three

Distance: three minute drive from my house. The closest yet.

Caretakers: One, a fiftyish Persian (of course) lady who was a teacher back in Iran. Her English is mediocre (much better than my Farsi, of course).

Details: $40/day (she was vague about full-time rates). Lunch and snacks provided. The kids were sitting at a table snacking on crackers when I arrived, staring at Dora the Explorer on a strategically placed TV.

She has a website which had a clear gentle-discipline policy posted, and that promotes learning. She says that she has her ECE and teaches the kids the alphabet, their numbers, and uses a map of the world to teach them their countries.

There is a contract, and for a deposit she would “hold” the space for me.

One baby, one full time kid and several part time kids.

The daycare is relatively new, and has only had one inspection since being licensed, which came up with the following violations:

Code Category/Description
203 Hygiene & Communicable Disease Control
“Sanitation or housekeeping” does not meet requirements.
204 Physical Facility, Equipment & Furnishings
“Storage practices of hazardous materials” does not meet requirements.

I liked:

Friendly, warm lady who gushed over Babby and whisked him over to the kids to say “look who will be coming!” She held him the whole time and took him around the room to investigate everything he pointed at.

Formal anti-hitting discipline policy.

I didn’t like:

Not only do they get TV, they get it twice a day – during snack time. The lady informed me that that was “all” because too much TV wasn’t good for them and she liked to teach them. Unfortunately, twice a day is still two times more often than I am comfortable with. Not so much for the kids, but the fact that the baby was sitting there staring at it too bothered me.

She was very pushy – she tried to get me to hand her a deposit to hold the space for her. Since I was still all like “oh hell no” about the TV, I politely declined, saying I would call if I wanted the space held.

She was more negative about the cloth diapers than the first two workers. Like them, she had very much a “but WHY?” attitude, but while they had seemed to shrug it off once I assured them that there would be no extra work involved, she seemed less comfortable with the idea.

I was disappointed by this daycare, because I had found the website very promising. I am also finding it very stressful to meet and connect with all of these women, knowing that I will end up rejecting most of them. I hate this sort of thing – meet them, talk to them, make friends, and then either never fulfill my promise to call them, or call and formally reject them. I hate having to pick someone, and I hate that I have to let the majority of these nice people down.

—

So it was with a heavy heart that I headed out to Daycare 4, which I had found by a fluke. It wasn’t listed on Daycarebear or godaycare, but its location near me caught my eye and a quick Google search with the name in quotation marks turned up a simple webpage with very little information. It styled itself as an eco-friendly “green” daycare, so I figured that this would be at least once place that might accept cloth diapering.

When I called, though, I wasn’t encouraged. I had to repeat “cloth diaper” over the phone multiple times before she could understand what I was saying, and then she said that they used disposables, that by licensing standards she couldn’t put them in cloth. I explained that I would bring my own and take them away and have them washed independantly, and she had said that THAT would probably be doable. I didn’t feel encouraged, though.

The problem with talking to these daycare ladies over the phone has been the fact that all of them have been Iranian. If you know anyone from the Middle East or India, you know that their accent and manner of speech is often clipped and hurried, and over the phone especially it often comes across as abrupt or rude by English-speaking standards.

I had been put-off by the phone manners of all of these women, but charmed by their real life counterparts.

So I went to go see the “Green” daycare.

Daycare 4

Distance: Near Daycare one – so about a four minute drive.

Caretakers: One, a middle-aged lady with two young girls who make up some of her daycare space complement. She is Persian (like all of them – is this a cultural thing, this Persian-daycare thing?) but in person her English is excellent. She is a nurse who decided to start a daycare when she realized that it would cost over $2000 dollars a month to put her two kids in care while she worked. She was friendly, chatty, and clearly takes pride in her work. She said she might be getting help in the future so she could have a few more slots open up.

Details: Rates are negotiable but trend at $880-900/month for full time care, lunch and snacks included. There are currently five children attending, including her own two, one of whom will be going to school in the fall. Her own children are 5 and 8, there is a 16 month old, a 22 month old, and another toddler (I didn’t quite catch the age) who comes part time. This means that the daycare is quite full, and she isn’t even positive about whether she will have a space in September. She says she needs to talk to the licensing board – with one of her kids going to school, and one of the babies turning two, she thinks she will be able to take another baby but she isn’t sure.

The children are allowed free run of the house (supervised) but there is a play room, a back yard, and a kitchen attached to the play room. The lunch menus are posted on the wall, and they included a variety of cultural foods, such as chicken curry, black bean burrito, and sockeye salmon roll. She told me that the food is organic whenever possible and that none of it is pre-packaged. She enjoys cooking and likes to prepare meals from scratch. She doesn’t believe in serving juice – she serves milk or water, but she has taken to making mango fruit smoothies for them occasionally as a snack.

Everything was very clean, but she told me that she only used natural cleaning products – no chemicals.

I liked:

Practically everything.

The lady was friendly, outgoing, and exuded competence.

She not only had a cork board filled with policies, weekly menus and such, but she also had a beautifully bound policy manual, printed in colour with clip art images (which her 5 year old daughter insisted on describing to me in detail: “This is a man. This is a woman. This is a doctor. This is a flower and it’s growing in dirt. This is mommy’s Allah-book. This is mommy.”) and it covers EVERYTHING. It is like she sat down and thought of everything under the sun that could possibly be related to child care and put it in that manual. When I managed to tune out the five year old, I spotted a policy on custody papers in the case of divorced parents, a policy on reporting suspected physical or sexual abuse and what constituted each, and an informational section on poisonous bug bites.

She offered to email me a copy so I could read it more thoroughly.

They don’t watch tv.

“His father” she pointed at the 16 month old “doesn’t want him watching TV, so we don’t watch TV. My kids do sometimes, because they’re older, but I get them to go upstairs, and actually since we don’t watch it down here, my own kids often go the whole day without asking to watch any at all.”

She LOVED my cloth diapers. She had never heard of a diaper service and thought it was a great idea. She was amazed at the price, saying that she thought it was still cheaper than disposables, and loved how eco-friendly it was.

She is familiar with baby sign language since both of the toddlers use it at home. “It’s great, the parents showed me the signs, and it’s amazing. They communicate with me, and they’re just babies! I love it!”

She also speaks in Farsi to the children occasionally “because it is good for them to learn other languages.”  I wish it were French, since that’s a national language here, but I agree with her that any language is good, and PH himself is learning a lot of Farsi, since he works in a Persian-heavy area (my area isn’t very heavily Persian at all, but apparently only Persians run day care here. Odd).

There have been no violations, but to be fair, there have been no inspections. She was just licensed less than a year ago.

This woman came across as so competent that I felt like I was inadequate by comparison, and that Babby would actually be better off with her than with me! I didn’t feel that there was a language barrier or a clash of priorities and expectations. I felt like we were on the same page. And she liked me, too, I could tell, mostly because I was patient with her obstreperous five year old.

I didn’t like:

She may not have space for me, and even if she does, she is going to need a committment from me, because her slot could fill up fast. I don’t know where I’ll be working or what my shifts will be, and she hit the nail on the head when she asked “So what if you don’t find a job in September?”

I could tell that she would take me in a heart beat if she could and if I could commit. But I’m worried that I may not find a job fast enough, even if she DOES have a spot open up.

(I’ve been job searching and job searching, but the only vets that are advertising are a) far away from me – an hour’s drive, almost – and b) vets who turned me down last year because of my pregnancy.

I plan on taking my resume around to every vet in the area in the hopes that some of them just aren’t advertising well.

But I’m scared. I need a job, and if I don’t find it fast I’m going to lose the best day care I have seen yet.)

Also, that five year old of hers was really something else. She started screaming when she saw me, “NO STRANGERS! I DON’T LIKE VISITORS NOOOOOOO!” and she hid in her room. Presently she came out and climbed all over her mother while her mother was trying to talk to me, insisting that her mother put her hair up in ribbons and then breaking into screams of rage when it didn’t meet her exacting standards. The mother was clearly frustrated with her and embarassed.

“I don’t know why she gets like this,” she told me, physically holding down the arms of the child, who had been flailing angrily at the approaching 16 month old, “she acts out for strangers lately.”

“She isn’t like this normally,” said the 8 year old seriously, shaking her head at her sister, “I don’t know what gets into her.”

On the one hand, I wasn’t impressed by her kid’s manners. On the other hand, it’s hard to judge someone based on the misbehaviour of their kid, because ALL kids misbehave occasionally and it often is calculated for the maximum embarrassment of the parent.

Also, at least she didn’t slap the kid or threaten her, although she also didn’t impose a time out or any other consequence other than speaking sternly and occasionally physically removing the child from a lap/from the other children.

Since I don’t have an obstreperous five year old, I’m not entirely sure what to make of that experience.

Disposable Diapers Are Literally Crappy

04 Tuesday Jan 2011

Posted by IfByYes in How is Babby Formed?, I'm Sure This Happens To Everyone..., Well, That's Just Stupid

≈ 14 Comments

Tags

cloth diapers, diapering, disposable diapers

So while we were in Nova Scotia, our diaper service was suspended. This meant that we had to buy some disposables to get us through. We do own a few cloth diapers of our own – gifts from a friend – and they are lovely but we only have the four. That wouldn’t get us through a day. So we went out and bought some Pampers.

When Babby and I arrived in Halifax, I noticed a spot on the back of his jammies when his grandmother was cuddling him. Since I’m not in the habit of lying my baby down in filth, I couldn’t figure out what it could be.

I found out at the next diaper change.,

POO.

The splotch was liquid, squirty baby poo which had spurted up through the back of his diaper and into his jammies. It was crusted all along his back.

I was unimpressed.

This became a regular occurrence. Not quite daily, but at least every second day, there would be a blowout situation in which feces somehow escaped Babby’s diaper and ended up on his clothes. It spread everywhere within his diaper – all over his penis and scrotum, all along his butt cheeks and then WHEEEE! up his back. Nor did it have the innocuous and virtually unnoticeable odour of his usual poops. Trapped in the greenhouse of the diaper, it developed a pervasive aroma which had me wrinkling my nose during diaper and clothing changes.

Not only this, but I discovered that the “whisk away wetness” properties of the disposable had the unpleasant effect of somehow desiccating the poop after it had finished its jolly roving ways, so that it was bonded stubbornly to my baby’s skin. I found myself gripping his tiny penis while scrubbing relentlessly at its base, trying to remove line of brown-green crust.

The real kicker happened a few days in, however. Upon removing a diaper one morning, I saw glistening droplets sparkling on my baby’s scrotum, and realized that I was looking at a proliferation of tiny, gummy chemical beads. They were scattered on his scrotum, his penis, his lower abdomen, and even down on his buttocks. The inside lining of the diaper had torn somehow, and the moisture-absorbing chemicals from within has spilled out all over my baby. Indignant, I immediately went to wipe those beads off of my baby’s genitalia, only to find that they wouldn’t come off. They stuck to my baby’s skin like chewing gum in hair, and wiping had no effect on them. In the end I had to take him into the bathroom and dunk his bottom in the sink and rinse the goop away.

He screamed like a stuck pig the whole time, I need not add.

Between the smell, the poop leaks, and the chemical explosion, disposable diapers were not getting a good review from me. Now, don’t get me wrong, cloth diapers leak too. They leak pee. If you don’t cover the cloth with the diaper cover properly, the wet diaper comes in contact with the baby’s clothes and a wet spot appears. It isn’t unusual for me to have to change Babby’s clothes in the morning after a 10 hour marathon overnight, especially if I’m using one of our poorer diaper covers.

But that’s just pee. Urine is harmless. It’s sterile, for one thing. It’s non-staining, for another. Not to mention that Babby is on an all-liquid diet so he pees round the clock, and if you’ve ever drunk a massive amount of liquid in one day, you’ll know how dilute your pee gets, so Babby’s pee is practically pure water. So the occasional wet spot on his clothes has never fazed me.

But poo is different.

Poo (even baby poo, which is the most innocuous of all poos) is GROSS.

And chemicals? Chemicals are CREEPY.

Me = UNIMPRESSED.

I developed a new strategy. On top of the disposable, I layered one of the massive deluxe cloth diapers that PH’s friend had given us. I only had four, but since a poo-splosion only occurred once a day or so, that was fine. It made Babby’s bum a little bulky, but I’ve always like a baby with a pat-able bottom anyhow.

My logic was that the poo, squirting out of the flimsy disposable, would meet the superior friction of the cloth and be stopped in its tracks.

It worked about 50% of the time.

So then I put a diaper cover over the cloth-disposable diaper combo, in the hopes that it might catch even more poo.

Babby’s bottom, swathed in three layers, now resembled a bowling ball and had the disturbingly spheroid look which I associate with very old, fat men in bad pants.

On our last day in Nova Scotia, Babby was sitting on PH’s mother’s knee when he got that George W. Bush-look on his face of perplexed concentration and let a loud one fly. Babby’s grandmother remarked good naturedly that she could feel the warmth of that one, so it must have been a veritable dump indeed.

It took a minute for it to sink through my brain.

Babby is wearing three layers.

NO poo is THAT warm.

“Uh… maybe I should change that diaper,” I said, reaching for my baby. I usually avoid snatching Babby out of people’s arms, because people are  pretty good about giving the baby back when they’re tired of him, and I don’t want to be one of those snatchy mothers. But I had a reason for this, and my fears were confirmed when I lifted him off of her knee.

There was a splotch on his pyjamas, running down his leg.

It matched a splotch on his grandmother’s knee.

We did a load of laundry that night and I could not wait to get home to our lovely, fuzzy, POO-RETAINING cloth diapers.

home sweet home

 

It’s so fluffy I’m gonna die!

19 Thursday Aug 2010

Posted by IfByYes in How is Babby Formed?, I'm Sure This Happens To Everyone...

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

cloth diapers, diaper services, happy nappy

My first order from Happy Nappy arrived today! It’s just the sampler pack plus the pail, really. Thirty diapers to start me off until their first delivery day after Babby’s birth.

The poor driver had trouble finding my place. Remember the Unexpected Asian Ladies Incident? Well, that sort of thing happens pretty often in our complex. There have been a couple more Realtor Incidents (although THEY rang the doorbell) and we got a pizza guy at our door last month, looking for the OTHER house of the same number on the other road. Apparently, this happened to the diaper service, but in reverse. He showed up at the wrong place. They must have been very confused by the man with a pail of diapers. Anyway, they called me and we got it sorted out.

I've been pawing happily through diapers all morning

Two cute things in one pic!


At least the poo will come in an adorably fluffy package

28 Monday Jun 2010

Posted by IfByYes in How is Babby Formed?

≈ 21 Comments

Tags

cloth diapers, diaper service, disposable diapers, feces, happy nappy, parenting

Happy Nappy Diaper Service

Photo credit to Happy Nappy Diaper Service

I have officially signed up for our diaper service!

For some reason I had been lulled into believing that as a relatively crunchy future mom I would be fairly into the mainstream in Vancouver of all places. I have been disillusioned of this, now. When we mention that we’re going to use cloth diapers, we often get raised eyebrows and an uncomfortable glance to the side, the way you might react if you met someone who informed you that they plan to use an outhouse instead of indoor plumbing.

You can tell they are thinking, “I bet they last a week”, and Perfect Husband has even received “pooper scooper” jokes.

One friend couldn’t get over the idea that the diapers would be brought to me only once a week.

“What if you run out?” she said. “You’ll run out for sure.”

We reassured her that the service is probably accustomed to providing a week’s supply of diapers at a time and most weeks should be able to correctly gauge how many we will need, based on the age of our baby and so on. We recieved a look of pity.

“You don’t understand how many diapers babies go through. My son had diarrhea once and went through ten diapers in six hours!”

I can see running out on a rare occasion, when our family’s Oregon Trail brings us the odd case of dysentary. But in the event of such a crisis, I’m pretty sure we could either run out to the store for some disposables or – stay with me here – wash some ourselves.

Maybe cloth diapers won’t work for us. But I find disposable diapers so disgusting that I am strongly motivated to make cloth diapering work. Besides, I got committed to getting a diaper service when I was 17 years old. Our Family Studies class compared the pros and cons of cloth vs disposables, including cost comparisons. I’ve spent the last decade assuming I would use a diaper service some day, so somehow in my head it became normal and I am now beginning to realize that it really isn’t, to most people.

I don’t really see what the big deal is. The diaper service doesn’t even require us to do any kind of pre-rinsing of the diapers. We take ’em off, fold ’em up, and dump them in the 14 gallon carbon-filtered diaper pail they will bring us. Is that so different from folding them up and dumping them in the garbage pail? But these diapers will be softer, better for baby’s skin, and way better for the environment, not to mention the public waste disposal costs of the government.

I also like that I know how much money we will spend on diapers over babby’s lifetime. Give or take the occasional purchase of disposables for travelling purposes, we can work out that we will spend approximately $3,000 on diapers. Since most diaper services offer their services free if your baby isn’t toilet trained by a certain age (our service’s cut-off is 30 months), diapers will become free after that point, even if we still need them. So, no pressure on Babby to toilet train – Mommy and Daddy want their money’s worth :-p

Then again, it helps that I have no fear of feces. Many mothers I have spoken to feel the need to impress on me just how surprising the amount and degree of feces was to them.  But after what I have done for a living, I really feel that while I will certainly have miserable moments, I won’t be shocked by them. My poo-shock factor has entirely been destroyed by previously traumatic episodes. So that’s a point in our favour for our attempt at cloth diapering.

Anyway, the really aggravating thing is trying to register for your baby shower when you’re the kind of person who plans on cloth-diapering her child. You know what we need, more than bouncy chairs or gift baskets filled with creams? Diaper covers. Oh, and swim diapers, because I want to take babby swimming. But Babies R Us has all of ONE selection for infant diaper covers, and I don’t even mean one brand. I mean one pattern. But we have to register somewhere fairly universal because so many of our loved ones may want to buy us things from afar. We’ll just have to hope it passes by word of mouth that we also would like diaper covers and other crunchy gifts which most stores don’t even carry.

In other news, Perfect Husband feels I neglected my duties in my previous post, because while I mentioned that we had a name for our son, and our name for our daughter, I completely forgot to mention our “scary neuter baby born without junk”. That’s right – the name-choosing has carried into what to call a hermaphroditic or otherwise gender-indeterminate child. We have all gender options covered.

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