Friday, October 12, 2012

Cloth Diapering

When I was pregnant, hubby and I decided that we wanted to do cloth diapering for our little lady. It's economical, eco-friendly, baby bum friendly and its how mommies used to do it back in the day.

Men and women wear underwear.  Most of the time we wear cotton underwear.  You handle your business in the toilet, clean up, and cover up with undies.  Simple concept right?  When your undies are dirty, you wash them either in laundry or by hand and use them again.  We've been doing this for years.  So that you don't have to do this everyday, you acquire a few pairs of underwear and wash them and your other clothes maybe once a week or every couple weeks or if you're like me, whenever the heck you can get around to it!

So now throw a baby in the mix.  Your baby doesn't now how to get up and use the toilet just yet, so they handle their elimination process wherever and whenever they feel like it.  Back in the day mothers would keep a cloth around baby bottoms so that they wouldn't make a mess on themselves, others or their surrounding areas.  Then they'd remove the cloth, wash and hang dry, and put on another cloth until that one got dirty.  Same concept as our underwear, just with a few more changes.  Eventually, a baby learned that when they peed or pooped, they'd feel uncomfortable in their own mess and then learned to wait until after cloth was removed to go the bathroom, hence the transition to potty training and regular underwear that they could put on and take off themselves.

But over the years, people got tired of doing this and clever people came up with ways to avoid the constant changing and washing and disposable diapers hit the market.  Genious! Convenient!  Easy!  It was like attaching a toilet to your baby's bottom that would soak up the pee and poop so neither you or baby wouldn't feel it.  No complaints there.

The key to disposable is that you eventually have to dispose of it.  All of the sudden you have "shit loads" (literally) of soiled diapers to deal with.   Before, you could just soak cloth diapers in water to get rid of the pee or wipe the poop in the toilet or bury it in the ground and wash off the cloth and start fresh again.  No trash anywhere, ever!

Now with disposable diapers you have stinky trash.  You also have stinky irritable baby bottoms and rashes from whatever chemicals are in these magical attachable toilets.

So with convenience, we have created another set a problems and need for creams and medicines and air fresheners and trash cans.  For some this is a minor issue, for others it's a big problem.

I choose to cloth diaper and my baby's bottom is a beauty!  Of course I've used disposables - during the first few newborn weeks, when traveling, and on some weekends when me and hubby were backed up on cloth diaper washing or other chores.  the disposables i've used are huggies pure and natural, seventh generation, target, and some European brand I picked up when we went to Paris.

I've used and continue to use various cloth diapers, diaper covers, washes, soaps, natural oils, etc.  for my cloth diaper journey read here 

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