cloth diapering

Okay, I love crunchy mama stuff.

I do. I am crunchy in some ways, and can't deny that--the home births, nursing toddlers, sleeping together.

But today emails showed up in my inbox about the wonderful-ness of cloth diapering.

Good God.

Pffflllbt.

I did that for eight kids. 

Back in the day disposables were expensive and not all that great.  Cloth was really the only option.

So we soaked the diapers and the washcloths (instead of diaper wipes) in a diaper pail.

Every other day we lugged that bad boy to the washer and threw it in, spun it out, and washed the diapers in Ivory Snow.

They'd come out of the dryer like an inviting, luscious pile of cottony fluff.

That's the good part.

(That's my beautiful grandpa helping me lift half a watermelon.)


Then we'd fold them.  Millions and dozens of diapers were folded in kite folds and stacked.  Liners were folded lengthwise and inserted inside.

Plastic pants gave way to nylon, which was way less scratchy, satiny even.

But still.

It's cloth diapers, for gosh sakes.

The time it took was real.

Plus the wetness,  lumpy-ness, and stinky-ness, and there's no way to romanticize wet diapers, sorry about that.

I heard they came out with special diapers that were just like disposables, all in one.

So how  would that work?    The cloth I used separated in the wash into layers soft and light as hankys.  These pre-fab things were sewn together in layers and pads that would never fully rinse and take forever to dry.

Ei-yi-yi.

So James, the seventh child, had eczema.  Overnight it would grow worse, redder, nastier, more blistery.

In search of relief for his butt, I bought a package of disposables for overnight.

Revolution. 

The disposables were no longer expensive, leaky, and clumpy.  They were amazing. There was no wetness to ignite his rash.

That was the end.

And no looking back. The best day of cloth diapers is nothing like the  sheer wonder of disposables.

I love rolling up a dirty diaper and tossing it.   I have never, ever missed dunking them in the toilet, wringing them out, flinging them in the diaper pail, ish.   No matter how fancy and cute the cloth diapers may be, there's still that.

Jay is a plumber. He still believes cloth were better environmentally--the waste goes into the sanitary sewer system, not into a landfill.    But he's over it too.   He spent enough decades doing this.  Plus the diapers he put on would inevitably fall off.  He could not seem to get them pinned tight enough.  We laughed that his diapers had a time-release feature.

To all you cloth diaper fans:  You go.  I adore your ambition.

To the rest of us?  Hell, yeah.   love, Val

jimmy