Cloth me mama

baby S sports a Motherease diaper

When we first decided to have a baby I decided three important things: the baby would be a girl, she would eat natural, homemade foods, I would probably breast feed her for 6 weeks maximum and she would not wear disposable diapers.

Many of these governing principles fell quickly by the wayside. First of all ultrasound reports, the first available as I am not one to wait around nine months for surprises, revealed that baby C would become baby S. This took some time to get used to. I had already bought three baby dresses in the last six years and moved them several times from house to house and box to box. The thought of a wardrobe full of suspendered jeans with truck and firemen motifs made my heart sink. I have since learned to embrace the inevitable and am delighted to discover that boys clothes can be very cute and little boys can be even cuter.

The natural foods part is an unwavering principle and has turned out to be a lot of fun. I love to cook and cooking for a baby is probably the most fun you can have in the kitchen. Imagine an instant little 'food critic' there at all times to immediately rate your culinary talents with a giddy toothless grin. You've gotta love it.

The breastfeeding just happened. I really didn't set out to breastfeed for very long. I had no confidence that it would work, that I would like it, that I would feel comfortable doing it or that my baby would enjoy it so much. I still can't believe that we'll have been doing this for 9 months in a few short weeks.

Finally the diapers. I could think of no other way I could have brought a child into this world without my cloth diapers. It became one of my biggest worries during pregnancy. What would I do with the dirty diapers? I didn't want to add to the landfill problem, throwing away 6-8 diapers each day for the next 2 to 3 years. And yet I couldn't see myself handling cloth diapers at all. Besides, while cloth is reasonably well known in the Unites States and England, no one and I mean NO ONE here in France uses them. I did a lot of research. I thought about disposable alternatives. I looked for biodegradable disposables but the source was only willing to ship to France from England. It all seemed unreliable and expensive. Cloth became my backup choice. I just was not looking forward to using them but I ordered a batch of them off of American E Bay nonetheless.

I used disposables for the first six weeks. It's true that they were convenient and easy. I was new to this baby handling thing and disposables were more familiar to me. Meanwhile I had 24 state-of-the-art Motherease diapers just sitting in the diaper cupboard. One day I ran out of disposables and there I sat diaperless. I was forced to finally try one of these strange cloth contraptions. And do you know what? The diapers fit like a charm. And baby S looked adorable all wrapped in padded cloth with his big 'ole baby butt. And miraculously the hours ticked, the diaper filled and it didn't leak! I removed it after about two hours or more and replaced it with another, the diaper bin slowly filling all the while. At the end of the day I dropped it all in the machine and ran a fairly steamy load of whites. I line dried them as instructed (you always have to line dry modern cloth diapers because of the elastic) and in no time at all the rotation began. I had baby S in cloth and he was happy and so was I.

I'm not trying to sell anyone on cloth but I would be remiss if I didn't say that it's easier than you might imagine. Baby poop is only very, very, very messy in the early days of babyhood when it's less solid. It's during this phase that you place the diapers in a pail to soak with tea tree oil and pretty much run your diaper wash in very hot water with little else in the machine. After a while the baby starts solid food and the poop easily 'drops' right into the toilet. The diapers get washed fairly poop free. Nowadays we often wash our towels and jeans right along with baby S's diapers with no qualms whatsoever. The diapers take up very little laundry space anyway so even early on you're washing very small loads. And, baby S has never had any diaper rash with cloth. The only times he's had a rash was ironically (or perhaps coincidentally) when he was wearing disposables. As far as traveling is concerned, I either take a pack of disposables if it's a particularly long trip with no washing machine readily available or I'll take a plastic sack to drop the old diapers into if it's a day trip.

Besides, where else can you find diapers this cute and help the environment out at the same time?


*Motherease is a good investment if you want baby in cloth. The diapers are brilliantly engineered to adjust over the first year of the baby's life. The covers are sold separately. I also use Bumkins all in ones from time to time. These also come recommended.


**I'm a SAHM (a "stay at home mom" or a "Shit Ass Ho Motherfucker" as Dooce eloquently puts it) and I'll agree that maybe these things have been made easier because I don't have to work during baby S's first year. I salute all working moms who take the time to breastfeed, co sleep, cloth diaper or make their own foods. You are the real goddesses.

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