So Call Me Chicken

Wednesday, July 16, 2008

Homemade cotton flannel baby wipe












Pins, vinyl covers, diapers (prefolds)













All of the homemade baby wipes I made












And this is where I need your help - what do I do with all of these fleece patches?








Ever since I heard a few cloth diaper fans talk about how great it is, I've secretly wanted to give it a try myself. Why?

1. Emma doesn't have diaper rash, but she has this rash (eczema) where the leg openings of the diaper meet her skin, and I thought that natural fibers might clear that up.

2. I heard that babies who wear cloth diapers potty train faster because they can feel when they're wet and want to be changed.

3. I've always been a do-it-yourself"er" and thought it would be neat to not have to rely on buying diapers and wipes (yeah, and it's cheaper, but that wasn't really my main concern).

4. I have been trying to implement anything "green" in our lives that I can and have been trying to consume less because of rising prices and to do our part in saving energy.

5. I found this website that talks about the basics of cloth diapering and I figured that I could get everything I needed just to try it for a week for about $30.

6. My Grandma and Mom did it, so why couldn't I?

Note to self here. If cloth diapers were so great, disposable ones wouldn't be the mainstream diapering choice!

I lasted 3 full days cloth diapering. Yep, I'm a big chicken. I just knew that I could keep doing it if I wanted to, but that I would eventually quit, so I figured I'd just quit now haha. This was easy, by the way, since Emmanuel didn't want me to do it from the beginning.

So why did I quit?

1. Poop! If your kid has consistently solid BMs, this may not bother you. But washing a messy cloth diaper out in the toilet is just plain shitty.

2. Every time you change your kid's diaper, you get your hands dirty. (And you're scared to death of stabbing them with a pin.) As soon as you take off the vinyl pants, the insides are all wet. The pee distributes all the way up the front and back of the diaper. Then you have to find a place to put it and the wipes so you can do the clean diaper...

3. The soaking unit. Until you wash the diapers, they have to stay soaking in soapy water. For me, this was the breaking point. On day 3 when I went to wash them, I had to try not to puke as I held back the dirty diapers and dumped the soaking water into the toilet. Then, I washed the diapers with bleach and HOT water, and they still smelled icky and one was stained bad, so I washed them twice, on double rinse cycle, just to be sure they were clean. I still don't think I'd ever use those ones as burp cloths or mouth wipers.

So, in conclusion, I'm a chicken, but as long as we can afford it, disposable diapers are my friend and will be with any subsequent children we have.

And since I made the baby wipes to stay within that $30 budget, I have to figure out what to do with the yard of cut-up fleece I never used. I learned after cutting and testing that regular fleece is soft, but NOT absorbent, and that it was cotton fleece I needed to buy. Any ideas on what to do with those rectangles of fleece?