Groovy offerings

To celebrate solstice yesterday we bleached the poop stains out of one of Charlotte's diapers!! What? You mean don't know about this ancient method of paying homage to the sun god?

Okay ha no, just kidding. It's just that I have wanted to post this for a long time and I will forget once we move. Did you know that the sun works wonders for bleaching out stains.? Whenever the cloth diapers come out of the machine with a little poo memory attached I toss them out onto the grass and in two hours they're white and stain free. It always impresses me how efficient mother nature is so yes I guess it is sort of paying homage, but my offering isn't so wonderful.

You can use this for any stain really. And yes, this may be a problem for those in less sunny locales but at least try it in the summer!

So pretty and soft!

Charlotte received an awesome gift from one of my blog friends, a beautiful rainbow collection of diapers all the way from Australia (well,...via Annecy). We love them and are totally sold on Fuzzibunz now.

With Little S and up to now we have used Motherease diapers and we were pretty happy with them because they adjust from newborn to age three, --incredible but true. They're a tad bulky though and since they aren't all-in-one diapers there is the extra step of putting the diaper cover on. They´re also kind of uncomfortable if they aren´t air fluffed in the dryer. I don´t have a dryer anymore so poor Charlotte has these concrete diapers scruffing up against her skin which she must have been hating for the past months. Also the elastic in the snap on cover is a bit tight and sometimes she has been getting these red marks on her legs from them.

Fuzzibunz are great though! They´re easy to use, soft and comfy and they have a liner which fits inside of them that you can just take out and soak in the diaper pail without having to soak the entire diaper--brilliant idea.

I think I will try to make a Fuzzibunz style diaper myself. The design is really simple and great. It will be a fun challenge and I can add some more colors and designs to her diaper wardrobe.

The onsie samurai

I've been dissecting onsies for the past month. I don´t know why they put the snaps in. I hate the snaps. We have always used cloth diapers on our kids and we never used the snaps or if we did our babies ended up having wedgies because the onsie pulled so tight against the diaper.

I've also been cutting off the sleeves of the numerous long sleeved Alpine onsies we seem to have a stockpile of and turning them into Little Mexican short sleeved versions. It´s so hot here that I am even cutting some sleeveless versions.

Be careful when chopping off your babie's onsies. Make sure they are long enough to handle the chopping. Sometimes it doesn't work out because the onsie is manufactured too short in the torso and is unchoppable. In our case I just stash it in the rag bag for other projects. No big loss. This onsie was unfortuantely one of those short ones. Oops.

Cloth diaper update

While we we're in the states I took twelve cloth diapers out of my stock of twenty-four diapers. It was kind of hard with just twelve diapers. I was so used to the twenty-four that I had a hard time keeping up with the laundry load. It didn't help that my mom kept subtly reminding me in that motherly nudging way that, "water is very expensive in Florida and well doing laundry every other day is not helping honey," So I decided to curb doing my own laundry to make up for it. I decided I'd just wear the same tee-shirt and skirt for days on end. Hey after all it was vacation in Florida. I was allowed to grunge-out a little bit, right. In fact I enjoyed it.

I found with Baby S's turning practically overnight from a little garden gnome into The Jolly Green Giant, that nighttime diapers had begun to become very, very saturated by morning. The poor critter was drowning in his own pee. I tried double liners with the Motherease and fleece pads, but he's become a big night wetter and there was nothing much to do about it. I tried lots of different combinations but nothing really worked well. So while In Florida we started to use disposables at night. This helped with the laundry load and baby S was drier through the night.

Now that we're back home we've adopted the same routine. He wears cloth during the day and disposables at night. I don't regret this choice. I do regret that I have to buy disposables. I don't particularly like them. I don't like supporting the industry that manufactures this product. It does make me uncomfortable to invest any amount of money in them. I'm not sure if I'll keep using them.

I just want anyone who is thinking of giving cloth a try to feel free to not be locked in to using only that. You can certainly try half and half or less. If you feel comfortable you can use all cloth or try just using the disposable diapers at night.

Believe it or not I'm so comfortable with cloth that I always prefer using them on the baby on weekends away and when travelling. As long as by the end of three days I have access, and permission to use a washing machine. Three days is the maximum amount of time to let them sit on the bin!

If the pee situation gets better and we have less wetness I'll go back to the cloth at night but for now the disposables are in our rotation.

Update: In December we went back to using the cloth 100 percent of the time. I just didn't feel comfortable buying the disposables. Baby S seems fine and it all seems to work well with one liner ad two fleece doublers. Vive le CLOTH!

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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