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.
If By Yes 