My Crunch has Gone Stale
Monday, January 10th, 2011I am going to make an announcement today. A revelation that might not make me any friends and may hurt my credibility as the Most Awesome Mother ever, but it’s time to stop living a lie. I cannot deceive you any longer.
I have failed at cloth diapering.
To be honest, the only reason I tried it was because it was trendy and cute and I convinced myself we could, I don’t know, take a trip to Paris or something with all the money we were going to save. Although if we DID save enough money to go to Paris I certainly wouldn’t want to carry around crap-filled pants the whole time. That right there should clue you in on how dedicated I was to cloth diapering. It was more “awwww, look at the polka dots!” and less “I love being environmentally responsible and making wise choices!” I’m kind of shallow.
It’s a shame, really, because I DO think cloth is a great way to go. I loved not having to buy disposables all the time and gloated a little bit at every person I saw with a whole cart full of Pampers at the warehouse store. Using cloth prevents so much trash and waste from going into landfills. You avoid all the weird chemicals in disposables, especially the kind that gave Little Evan a horrible rash. Using cloth does save money, especially when you use them for multiple kids – which, hey, sounds perfect for me! I have multiple kids!
But. The poop. OH MY GOD SO MUCH POOP.
My slow slide away from cloth started with the morning sickness. Getting pregnant directly coincided with Little Evan weaning, which meant no more nice, easy breastfed poops. Instead, my toddler started producing GIANT SMELLY MAN SIZED CRAP. The kind I could barely stand to be in the same zip code with, let alone carry around until I could shake it out into a toilet. And if it was…sticky? Forget about it. Anything that required the diaper sprayer also required 20 minutes of heaving into the toilet thanks to my insane sense of smell and hair-trigger gag reflex. AREN’T YOU DYING TO HEAR MORE ABOUT THIS?
So we used disposables. Then the night time peeing got totally out of hand and going back to cloth would have resulted in even MORE soaked PJ’s and sheet changes. We bought another box of Luvs. And another. Then my cloth stash started to smell sort of…weird so I had plans to strip them all and sort the ones I could use with the new baby into her dresser. I totally Googled “how to strip your cloth diapers” and everything. But I was tired and still didn’t feel so well and wasn’t really interested in doing anything that would create more laundry for myself so I never did.
Do you want to hear MORE excuses? KIDNEY STONES. Boom. Hard to enforce the cloth diaper use from the hospital.
Now, with two in diapers and no end to that scenario in sight, I feel like all I do ALL DAY is look at dirty butts. Pooping is Caroline’s only real skill right now so she’s decided to dedicate herself to what she’s good at. It is not at all uncommon for her to poop immediately after a diaper change, only to do it AGAIN after the next one. That’s three poops in less than 5 minutes, which, multiplied by 5 times a day means I would need approximately EIGHTYBAZILLIONTEEN baby-sized diapers to avoid several loads of laundry daily. It doesn’t help that Little Evan is apparently competing for the title of Poop Champion and is no longer on the twice-a-day schedule.
So. Much. Poop.
I think once Caroline gets a little older I might switch her back to cloth. I really did like it for the 4 months I did use them. And when we start *ACK* potty training Little Evan I think the cloth might be a good transition between disposables and underpants. Because I still have all these diapers. And they do save money. And they are super cute. And I do like being a cloth diaper mom.
But for now, please accept my apology for not being quite as crunchy as I used to be.