The Cloth Diaper Project

I've always wanted to try them, but when we started having babies we didn't have our own laundry facility. Then the investment scared me--what if we dropped all that cash and I hated them? But I think my mother-in-law has been reading Kelly's inflammatory rhetoric ;), because out of nowhere she started sewing up cloth diapers like mad and mailing them to me. They are fitteds with an internal PUL liner. My oversized three month old wears them, and I also put them on my undersized almost-2-year-old during naps (which, in addition to overnight, is the only time she wears diapers now, woo hoo!). They are comfortably snug in the legs on both kids; I just cinch the Velcro fasteners tighter for Baby Dude. We are only partially operational so far while she sends me small batches of different designs for testing.

Analysis

--This is a much more intimate enterprise than disposables. I don't know if I could have handled it on Baby 1, but I'm pretty well acclimated to extremely disgusting things by now. Do not attempt without a sprayer that attaches to your toilet, it's too demoralizing otherwise. Yes, yes, we have it so much easier than our mothers. Blessed are they.

--I don't know if I would want to go this route postpartum. My postpartum day looks like this: sitting on the couch, feeding the baby on the couch, napping with the baby on the couch, changing the baby on the couch, getting an older kid to throw away the diaper I just changed. Getting up and rinsing yellow poo out of 97 diapers a day isn't going to fit into that setup seamlessly.

--And it would be 97 diapers because they are always, always wet or worse, even with that PUL liner. Disposables absorb a lot of pee and you don't notice it (sometimes you can't even tell if they're wet). Cloth diapers are always soaked, so you go through a ton of them.

--An overnight disposable diaper is gross. I can hardly imagine how gross an overnight cloth diaper would be considering what they're like after 45 minutes. I'm afraid the carpet would be saturated. I'm not using them overnight. (Or what passes for overnight with my primary test subject.)

--They're very bulky.

--They're very cute.

--But you can't ever see how cute they are, since you always have to put plastic pants over them, since they're (see above) always, always wet. I have one diaper cover from Kushies, and it doesn't work AT ALL (also PUL, I think--can't say I'm too impressed with the stuff). So I'm using those old school Gerber numbers. I don't like them but they keep me from having to change Baby's clothes every time I change his diaper. IMHO, this pretty much shoots down the "breathability" argument you hear for cloth diapers for anyone who can't afford those fancy shmancy wool covers (and do they really work, really? Grandma is going to make one for me to try so I'll let you know). Breathable and dry are mutually exclusive. Grandma notes that PUL is described as a "wetness barrier," not "waterproof." Riiiiiight.

--Costs are going to go up during the winter. I'm relying heavily on line drying now because the sun dries, disinfects, and bleaches free. If the line isn't an option, you have to run the dryer on high heat for a LONG time (and they still aren't bleached). Dryers are the second most expensive appliance to run, so I'm not too keen on that. Church pays our utilities and I don't want to pass on the costs of this scheme. We could throw in an extra check to offset it, but it still bothers me. Nobody likes seeing the bills go up.

--They're very gratifying to use. Disposables always feel so wasteful--those huge boxes of stuff, just tossed in the trash year after year.

--I can't help thinking that if I were a baby, I'd be more comfortable in a disposable that pulls all the wetness away from my skin than a cloth that spreads it over the entire area of the diaper, making me that much wetter. (No results to report on diaper rash, this guy doesn't get it with either. One of our kids had pervasive rash with disposables, but she just has high maintenance skin. There is no doubt in my mind she'd have had rash with cloth diapers, too.) I can't bring myself to be intrinsically scared enough of diaper chemicals to blow off their dry-keeping powers.

So that's my experiment so far. I plan to stick with them on about a 3/4 basis (ie not overnight, for travel, or when we have company) because I have them and don't mind the extra work, but it is a big adjustment. I'm not really clear on why when you Google "cloth diapers" you turn up all these quotes about how people love them so much. This strikes me as another one of those things where the organic parenting community isn't being entirely forthcoming with the facts (cf natural childbirth, breastfeeding, etc.). I don't know why, since openness about the difficulty of these approaches makes self-righteousness that much easier. ;)

Cloth diapers: the war rages on

Oh, cloth diapers. I am so tired of you making me think about diapers all the time.

Ok. Little Dude has been in cloth diapers for most of his life. I didn't have them until he was about three months old, and I had a relapse for a couple of months, and I don't use them when we travel. But it is time for me to admit the truth. He has developed a chronic rash in them, and it goes away whenever he's in disposables.

This rash persists despite the fact that I am good about changing him very promptly, and he usually stays dry during his nap of his own accord. I cannot find a balm or emollient which suffices preventatively or remedially. He's a manly baby man, but he still has sensitive skin. He'll probably be in Gillette commercials someday and buy me a nice trailer and let me live in his backyard.

I'm just not board with disposables being carcinogenic or otherwise personally hazardous (and totally unqualified to have come to this conclusion, since there is no way of knowing which side in the absurdly inflated argument not untainted by the premise that babies are bad is actually right), so I'm making one final attempt. I'm now experimenting with Chinese prefolds, thanks again to my diaper sugar mama aka Grandma, and if they work, that will be great and mean a lot less dryer time in the winter and I'll buy me some Snappis because pins stink.

But if they don't, that imaginary stack of rank disposables on my ridiculous Al Gore-influenced conscience and my dogmatic notion that it only makes sense for people with a lot of kids to use cloth diapers just cannot outweigh my baby's comfort any longer. I KNOW that the cloth diapers I've been using are personally hazardous to this particular person. He cries whenever I change him. It's terrible.

This all came into focus a few mornings ago when my husband found me retching in the bathroom as I pregnantly sprayed out a really noxious specimen, informed me that this is completely insane, and offered to contribute the MONEY he earns at his JOB so that his son and I will no longer be afflicted in our bodies by this matter of principle. Um . . . right.

So, maybe the prefolds will work, or maybe Baby 5 will be a better candidate for cloth, or maybe Jesus will come back before I have to find out.

Further reflections on cloth diapers

This is, what, Month 8 of the experiment? I'll be honest, when it got cold I went through a burnout phase and retreated to disposables for I'm not sure how long. I'd guess at least two months. Running the dryer so much was too depressing, and I was also sick of carrying around a pee-soaked baby all the time. But Lil Dude took very slowly to solids, so this place was still Blowout Central, and you may recall the one truly compelling virtue of my homemade cloth diapers from Grandma is that they are blowout proof. So I went back. I was worried about staining now that I can't sun-bleach them any more, and indeed no one's going to mistake them for the driven snow, but what do I expect diapers to look like anyway? I toss in some OxiClean for superstition.

I've called off the wool soakers, though (at least for the winter months). They are too much maintenance for a product that just doesn't work. It wasn't that big of a deal for him to be dampish all the time when the weather was warm, but I don't want him crawling around wet in the winter, and I don't have enough clothes to change his entire outfit every time he goes, and I don't want to create that much more laundry. So he's in the fitteds with internal PUL liner and the old school Gerber plastic pants, and a pox on breathability. The rash factor isn't any better or worse than in disposables or wool soakers. Change him right away and he's fine. Miss one and you're bleeped.

I have a hypothesis about that early toilet training thing. Even housebreaking a kid who's ready for it stinks. You're bound to have more pee on the floor than most folks care for, which gets a girl down (and a dad ENRAGED) real quick like. By the end of the first morning, diapers are looking a lot better than any more of this, so you decide to table the housebreaking for a few more months. It may take several tries, accruing 6 months or more, before loathing of diapers surpasses loathing of toilet training.

But parents who use cloth diapers are used to close, personal interaction with pee &c. Their hands are dirty all the time, so they see that first toilet training attempt through rather than getting discouraged right away and calling it off. Then they get to be smug about how their kids toilet train earlier. Just a hypothesis. I'm interested to test it out--both of our girls toilet trained out of disposables earlier and easier than our older son, so Boy 2 will be a good test case. And, I know, the kid can feel he's wet, blah blah blah.

Bottom line: diapers are gross, no matter what kind you use. I can see being pregnant more times. I can see delivering more babies. I can see more years of nursing. But the thought of toilet training even one more kid makes me want to run straight out of town without bothering to pack a suitcase.

Cloth diaper update

Abstract: For fitted cloth diapers with PUL liners, wool soakers are the best (though still imperfect) covers. Homemade soakers knit from organic wool yarn purchased from honest folk are the most economical option. Previous post here if you missed it.

I've been doing disposables overnight only for a week and a half (although I did take Food Poisoning Morning off). It's . . . ok. Grandma sent me three wool soakers, two knitted from organic wool and one made from wool/lycra interlock fabric. I'm lanolinizing that last guy right now and looking forward to trying it out. The other two soakers do a pretty decent job of keeping Baby Dude dryish, and I would say they are net beneficial as compared to those awful vinyl pants (and completely ineffective PUL wraps). If he takes a long nap, he's vaguely damp, but not drenched, and it doesn't really warrant a change of clothes.

The main drawback of the soakers is that they are another layer of considerable bulk. Baby is a big guy for three months and was on the verge of moving into 6-12M clothes when I started this. But with a diaper and a soaker on, I can barely get a pair of 12M pants over his bum. So if you're just starting out, invest in roomy rompers. If you're stuck with an older sibling's wardrobe, get yourself a shoehorn. The wool/lycra number is a little thinner so I hope it works well enough to be our default.

I think "organic"products are 99.99999999% marketing ploy conceived to manipulate people into allowing themselves to be ripped off, so I don't know why it has to be organic wool. But far be it from me to toy with something one short layer removed from my dear baby's dear bum.

I am still getting used to conveying nasty diapers from baby to pail--these things just don't wrap up so nice and easy with all the evil safely taped and plasticked inside. There are definitely more germs running loose in my house now. I'm trying to come up with a better system to cut down on this given our unique floor plan. I'm also not clear on why the soaker concept isn't considered gross. So these things soak up pee, and you wash them every couple of weeks, and everybody's just ok with that? I know, the miraculous properties of wool and all. Whatever.

I'll take An Album Cover for 300.

Although life is damper, I would be remiss not to tell you that I have not had a single blowout in a cloth diaper. Baby Dude is not as explosive as his predecessors (preferring the glurking route to making my life disgusting), but he still had some mishaps in disposables. CDs have been secure so far, both in the back and legs. I remember 4-6 months being prime blowout territory, so I'll report back if necessary.

One last thing. Grandma says the cost of cloth diapers is a crime. The materials aren't expensive, and a yard goes far when you're making something so small. Same goes for soakers, which I've seen online for such low prices as $48 (EACH). I heard a few places (maybe even in the comments of the last CD post? too lazy to verify) that smart shoppers buy organic wool sweaters at thrift stores and reknit them into soakers. I asked Grandma about this and she thought I was stupid. She said unless I could find an organic wool sweater for $2 ($3-4 is the base price for adult clothes at my local Goodwill, and they jack it up for premium items), it wouldn't be worth it.

The trick is to buy yarn at the right place, ie not from cloth diapering businesses. She got hers from those nice Mennonite types at the Amana Colonies at a reasonable price and dyes it herself with Kool-Aid. And as for the labor charges built into the prices, she says that when women in China are getting paid $.12 an hour to sew, seamstresses don't have any business charging so much for their work. Almost sounds like a liberal, doesn't she? :D

Training

It is often said that when a child is toilet trained earlier in its life rather than later, it is not in fact the child who is trained, but the parents.

This is entirely stupid, as I will now prove.

The first factor which must be understood is that toilet training a child is the absolute worst task in childrearing. The absolute worst. It awakens a previously unwrathful parent to her own shockingly vast capacity for unmitigated wrath. It is the task most likely to make an at-home mother long to pay some other person (perhaps the drunkard across the street or an arthritic labradoodle, any arthritic labradoodle) to take over the care of her child. It is the task most frequently begun and abandoned. It is the task most often left to fall entirely on the shoulders of mothers, as fathers simply cannot handle it.

The second factor that must be understood is that diapers are SO DISGUSTING. A child on a normal human diet excretes exactly the same thing that normal humans excrete. At some point, the horror of having her face inches from this disgustingness every day of her life outweighs a mother's doubt as to her child's readiness. She cannot continue to change diapers. The child--whether or not he can talk or has expressed interest or has attained the necessary age du jour--must be housebroken. (NB: this is why children of an at-home mother are usually toilet trained earlier in life than children whose care is divided among different persons over the course of a day. The sole caregiver wears out faster.)

So a young child becomes a candidate for toilet use. And the mother must run all day long. She must keep the child off furniture and carpets. She learns that she can no more make her child excrete than she can make him eat, sleep, or be quiet. She must clean unspeakable messes from the rising of the sun to the going down of the same. If it becomes too much, she goes back to diapers until once again she is overtaken by that disgustingness. She tilts on the brink of madness for the duration of this period. Amen, amen, no one gets it.

However, many young children succeed. They are granted the excretory epiphany. They become users of toilets and wearers of underwear, and there is much rejoicing. But still the child is young. He cannot put on his trousers in the morning; neither can he rule them in the bathroom. He is too short to climb stairs, so also to scale toilets. He is too stupid to wash his hands in the kitchen: similarly the bathroom. Thus do parents (for the fathers have begun to return at this point) RUN RUN RUN to the bathroom when the child announces his need of it, and in so doing, appear to be slaves of an untrained child.

But only to those who do not realize that if a kid too young to dress and wash himself is able to discern and communicate his need for and carry out the act of eliminating in the toilet, wizardry must almost certainly be involved.

Only to those who have never changed a diaper, or have been so long from the task that its disgustingness has somehow been forgotten.

Only to those who know neither the expense of disposable diapers nor the labor of cloth diapers.

Only to those who are unaware that a dirty diaper must be changed as promptly as a young child's call for the bathroom must be attended.

Only to those who do not understand that the greatest hero on any day of human history is not the discoverer nor the inventor nor the orator, but the child who for the first time in his life refuses to befoul himself.

Why I'm not an Organic, Attachment, or Otherwise Superior Parent

Many moons ago when I was pregnant with Baby 1 my dear friend Gauntlets sent me Dr Sears' The Baby Book so I would be a good mom. I learned that I should nurse the baby, wear the baby in a sling, nurse the baby, sleep with the baby, nurse the baby, etc. Ok, I thought. The marvelous Mrs Sears was there too to provide inspiration: need some milk and don't have a pump? No problem, just manually express 8 ounces over your lunch break! I was so ready.

Then the baby was born and I had Nursing Problems. I couldn't have an eight pound baby smashed up against my shredded self all day long. I couldn't wear a sling. I couldn't wear a shirt. I absolutely could not feed the baby on demand cue. Next thing I knew, I wasn't an Attachment Parent. Just as well, as I've learned since then that it wouldn't have worked out anyway. (Incidentally, my baby-slinging, sleep-sharing, homeschooling friend Gauntlets, some of whose kids have long out-nursed any of mine, still claims to like me.)

This is yet another weird thing about CSPP. Many people who have a lot of kids are also highly evangelical members of various organic/Attachment Parenting lobbies: homebirth, babywearing, co-sleeping, cloth diapering, extended breastfeeding, homeschooling, anti-vaccination, etc. There are people with lots of kids who make these things work. But they don't work for everybody, and I'm not prepared to consign the many people for whom they don't work to the ranks of the irredeemably lazy, selfish, worldly, and/or mentally pliable.

No hard feelings here. But in general, my impression of the hard-core organic parenting community (and by hard-core I'm referring to those who come at it with a Reformed obsession with Law, or a liberal religious devotion to Earth, for whom there is no Christian or any other kind of freedom) is that they take the appeal to nature fallacy as their starting point and extrapolate from there. This comforts me when I see how much organic milk costs.

Attachment parenting is a fine thing, but it is ultimately a personality style restyled as a lifestyle. Some people, men and women, have an exceptional ability to be close to children. They have a gift which enables them to scrub bathtubs in a child-nurturing way. I think they are wonderful people, truly. But I just don't have the gift any more than I can prevent a conversation from getting awkward or land a single salchow. I can affect preschool-teacher perkiness or Romantic-era maternal tenderness for 75 minutes, but it leaves me exhausted, snappy, and unable to come up with what to fake next--and it's only 9:25, and nobody washed the breakfast dishes.

The good news is that I practice my parenting a lot more than I practice my salchows, so there's hope for improvement there. But call me an introvert, a choleric, a thinking type, a firstborn, whatever Boomer-conceived psychological category explains it: I'm just not drawn the attachment parenting way. I'm not a cuddler, a dancer, or an imaginer. But I am a mom. I carry my baby in my arms, I make rules for my prickly self to ensure that everybody gets their warm fuzzies (and you'd likely be horrified to learn the kind of rules I've had to make), and I often keep my distance so that I can keep my temper.

To illustrate: all marriages are different. Some couples are moony, some like to hassle each other, some keep their spheres separate, some tell each other everything, some thrive on spontaneity and some need schedules. What works for them is their business. And parent/child relationships are different too. You don't have to be Attached to be attached. I'm even willing to entertain the common yet impossible to prove assertion that Attached children are better cared for. I wish I had it in me naturally, but I don't. Somehow, though, my kids and I get through the day and still wake up basically liking each other.

What this all comes down to is that parents do what enables them to survive. For some people, the hallmarks of attachment parenting are the easier route (as they love to tell you). For other people, a baby in bed means at least one adult doesn't get any sleep, homeschooling means a houseful of miserable people (and illiterate kids) at the end of the day, babywearing means a pile of expensive slings wadded up at the back of the closet, etc. Not every "attachment" is net beneficial for every family--simply breastfeeding is a huge challenge for a lot of people, and that's one of those things that scores pretty darn low in optionality. It's foolish to force oneself and one's kids into a lifestyle choice (to the extent that any of these things are choices for any family, which also varies) that makes everyday life torture.

To all y'all who have no exersaucers or foreskins in your house: congratulations, really, because those decisions come at a respectable price (unless you married a hippie and had all girls :D ). We'd also do well to remember that God didn't mention sleeping arrangements or total wastes of $40 Maya wraps when that multiplying business came down. The procreative faithfulness to which he calls all husbands and wives does not mean that we have to join La Leche League, subscribe to Mothering, or keep a pesticide-free-grass-fed milch goat in the yard (not that there's anything wrong with that!). We take the kids he gives us, learn patience and sacrifice, and live out the daily details as they work for our families.

The life of a sinner has enough guilt built into it. Let's not let anxiety and animosity over diapers drive people to dreary isolation or desperate contraception. The fact that we make different choices shows nothing more than that we're different people with different priorities, abilities, and options. The choices a person makes do not indicate of themselves that she has or has not done her homework.

CSPP has room for girls from all points on the maternipolitical spectrum.

(I can't promise to respond to ignorant and/or argumentative comments. All comments suggesting that victims of any particular sort of parenting club are more sick, happy, psychopathic, insecure, polite, agile, etc., will be laughed at.)