Refuse to be Manipulated

I've blogged about cloth diapering before. And while I try not to be offensive and respect people's choices, I sometimes shake my head and think, "Dude. Cloth diapers. End of discussion."

I am an unlikely advocate for cloth diapers. I'm a bit of a germ-a-phobe, I hate mess and clutter of any and all kinds, and I have a highly sensitive gag reflex. And yet. I think anyone who plans to have more than one child should start off cloth diapering. I think almost EVERYONE should be cloth diapering right now.* Dude. Can you imagine how many diapers the Duggars have gone through alone?!? Seriously.

We started cloth diapering because I was fairly certain that I would want to quit work to stay home with the Boy and I knew that our budget was going to have to tighten. So in typical Mormon fashion, I started to prepare in advance. Chris and I saved and saved and SAVED as much money as we could (almost HALF of my annual salary) and then I started making plans to cut our weekly expenses. I had planned to breastfeed exclusively (I planned for a year but yeah...my boobs think that they're really only here for aesthetics) and we made it for five months. I bought baby clothes from consignment and half price sales to last for the whole first year. And we planned to cloth diaper. So initially it started out as a good financial decision...

Then we started talking about other aspects. Did you know that Burnstopia has NEVER seen a stitch of diaper rash. (yes, I'm knocking on every wooden surface within reach.) And since I tend to break out in a rash just by looking at certain things, I'm chocking that up to the cloth diapers. The Boy...he has my skin (it's still nearly translucent and you can still see all the veins in his head...it's quite pretty in an anatomical kind of way...), and the cloth diapers--free from all those nasty chemicals and pulpy paper--keep him fresh as a spring day.

I love this clip from Saturday Night Live--especially the bit where Madonna is talking about burying a diaper in her back yard. The depressing truth is that it takes disposable diapers 500 YEARS to decompose, let alone grow anything. And what no one ever talks about is the fact that you're not supposed to wrap up the solid waste and dispose of it in the diaper itself. It can contaminate ground water supplies. (For the record you're supposed to shake ALL solids into the toilet whether you use cloth or disposables. And if you're going to do that with disposables, you may as well use cloth diapers!)

Environmentalists talk a lot about carbon footprints, and one of the things people don't talk about with carbon footprints is CHOICE. With cloth diapering, you have a choice of how big of a carbon footprint you leave. We use all natural detergent and we line dry everything. With disposable diapers you have NO choice, none. And isn't choice a good thing?

And yes, I've heard all the counter arguments, all that laundry! The squick factor! Extra work! It's so HARD! And all I have to say is BULL. First of all, from the moment we brought the Boy home I was drowning in laundry, a load of diapers every couple of days is NOTHING! To say nothing of the fact that I wash them in the washing machine, I don't beat them on stones to clean them! The machine does all the work, so really, are you kidding me? And lastly, I've seen nastier things from my son in disposables than I have in cloth. He's NEVER had a blow out in cloth diapers--I cleaned up more than a few of them in disposables. And once you've cleaned up a blow out, you've done more than clean up a cloth diaper. At least in the cloth diapers I only have to clean the diaper and not everything he was wearing and/or sitting on!

Now. I know...I can hear some of you thinking from here, "Well, the kind of diapers you use are so nice and expensive, I don't have the money to buy those." Maybe so, maybe no. We bought the bumGenius 3.0s and now that we have them we've also bought some lovely, soft prefolds to use when we travel. They're cheaper than the bumGenius but just as effective. Slap on a waterproof cover and it doesn't get much simpler than that. We're starting to look ahead to baby version 2.0 and planning for that child to be cloth diapered exclusively. And there are more than a few websites specializing in reselling the more expensive diapers. And let's pause for a moment to think about the fact that cloth diapers will last for more than one child, and suddenly they aren't quite so expensive.

Lastly, let me warn you all. Don't be Manipulated. The makers of disposable diapers WANT you to believe that cloth diapers are too inconvenient, too messy, too expensive blah blah blah. They're making MONEY on you. They want to scare you into a disposable submission. And in case you don't believe me, check this out. And we come back to choice. I'm not about to be dictated to by a big business conglomerate about how to parent my child--and nor should you.


The Boy says, "My heiny is happy in my cozy soft diapers!"










(And yes, those are my feet in desperate need of a pedicure. A pedicure that's going to wait for a good long while until I can rationalize spending $20 for a really good foot rub.)


*I do think that there are some reasonable exceptions to the rule, frequent travelers and those moms of extreme multiples--you know quintuplets (oh bless us and save us) and such, those poor women are totally off the hook.