Posts tagged Diapers

Green Adventures: a series in which we invite you into the adventures from our journey.

Diaper Changes (Part 3)

Drum roll please.  This is the moment all you regular readers have been waiting for.  That’s right!  The conclusion to the series tracking my family’s journey to switch to the more creation-friendly cloth diapers is finally here.  If you are a new reader or happened to miss the original posts, I recommend you start with part 1 and part 2.

This final post will note a little more about our experience, list the items you would need to get started, give step-by-step instructions for diaper changes and laundry, provide you with some tips to be successful, and finally give you my evaluation of the prospect of switching to cloth diapers.

*Many thanks to my wife who has been more than helpful in putting together this post.

Experiences

Here are a few more experiences that have come up in the weeks since the last post:

We (normally my wife) do a load of diapers every 2 or 3 days right now. Of course, that depends on how many diapers your child uses a day and how many you own. We have 18 and my daughter uses about 5 a day these days. But if you have a newborn who is using around 10 a day, you might need a lot more. In fact, we will probably pick up a few more if and when we have another baby. Be sure to factor this into how many you buy.

There have been a couple times where we chose to put her in some leftover disposables when others were watching her because we didn’t know if they would know how to change the diapers. Of course, we have learned that with a brief explanation they do an adequate job. Problem solved.

At first the diapers seemed to leak a lot, but it turns out that it was not the fault of the diapers. Turns out we just needed to arrange them a little better on her body. Haven’t had a leak in weeks.

Finally, we have had a closer relationship with human excrement than I was used to. I have had to become a little more used to touching urine (i.e. when removing the wet inserts) than I had been. The reality is that you quickly get used to that (and all the other steps) and it becomes routine.

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Green Adventures:  a series in which we invite you into the adventures from our journey.

Diaper Changes (Part 2)

Last week I wrote part 1 of a series of posts through which we bring you along on our journey to switch from disposable diapers to reusable cloth diapers.  I walked you through the decision process and my hopes and fears.  We have now been using the BumGenius cotton diapers for 1 week and it’s time to update you on the latest on our journey to better care for God’s creation.

So, we are one week in.  That’s certainly not enough time to experience all the pros and cons of switching to cloth diapers.  However, I wanted you to be able to walk through this with us.  Besides, it wouldn’t be very exciting if I just told you all the tips and how-tos once all was said and done.  The point of journeying together is that you can experience the ups and the downs together with me.
It has been an interesting week.  For the most part we have really adapted well.  There has been no second guessing ourselves or wondering if we could return the diapers.  We have made the jump and there is no looking back.  We simply grab a different type of diaper than we did before and have a modified process once the dirty diaper is off (more to come about how it all works in part 3).  Although it does take more time to change a dirty (aka poopy) diaper, a wet diaper does not take any longer.  In fact, I have been surprised at the relative ease with which we have made the  transition.

[Continue reading to see more about how the week went]

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A series in which we invite you into the adventures from our journey.

Diaper Changes (Part 1)

Many of the changes that we make to care for God’s creation are really quite easy.  Often it only means purchasing one product instead of another.  For example, buying LED or compact fluorescent light bulbs instead of incandescents.  Other times it is just a subtle change in habit like remembering to switch off lights and unplug electronics that are not being used.  However, there are other times where it is much more difficult and it really challenges us to go green.  The reality is that caring for creation often comes at a cost.  And our latest adventure is one that I think will definitely come at a cost.

My wife and I have wanted to change to more eco-friendly diapers for a long time.  In fact, we were really looking into it a year or so ago but couldn’t pull the trigger.  Since almost everyone we know uses one of the same two brands of disposable diapers there was a sense of fear about what lay beyond the known world.  It was like we were embarking into some dark chasm of the unknown world of alternative diapers.  Somehow it slipped our minds and before we knew it another year had passed.

Now, for those of you who don’t know, disposable diapers are really awful for the environment.  The short of it is that it takes them ages to break down, they preserve bacteria and whatnot which can get into water that may not be treated properly, and they take up a ton of space in our landfills.  Most of the time there is just no beating things that we reuse versus things that we throw away in terms of carbon footprint and environmental cost.  This seems to be one of those times.  Did I mention how stinking expensive disposable diapers are?  Even when you buy them from discount stores in the largest packages possible (which at least reduces packaging) they are not cheap (about 20-25 cents each).  Not to mention that babies use a lot of them each day.  My daughter, who is almost 2, uses about 5 a day, but it was easily twice that when she was really little.  Well, that really adds up my friends.

So, recently the whole area of diapers came up again as we targeted new areas of our life to change in order to better care for God’s creation.  We looked into the more eco-friendly disposable diapers.  We discovered however that even the “eco diapers” came at a steep cost.  There were certainly improvements over regular diapers, don’t get me wrong, but to be honest they just seemed like minor incremental changes.  It’s nice that they are chlorine-free and are made from better materials.  Unfortunately, however, they just did not seem to do the trick and ultimately still wind up making our landfills a little taller and smellier.

We kept looking.  Of course, there aren’t too many more places to look.  There are really only 2 other options; well, 3 if you are okay with your toddlers walking around naked, conducting their business wherever they please.  The first (and better if you can pull it off) is to potty train your child early.  In our case, our daughter is not yet ready for that step.  If your child is, more power to you.  Using the toilet would certainly be the best option.  The second is to move to cloth diapers.  At this point we were past the point of no return.  We had decided to move forward but did not know it would cost us so much.  We were slipping head first into a big pile of… well, at least they are made of cotton.  So, we made it official.  We were moving into the world of cloth, non-disposable diapers.  A world that is much more complicated.  A world that takes a lot more work.  A world in which my likelihood of getting human excrement on myself is much higher.  But a world which is much cheaper (we expect to recover the initial cost outlay in about 3/4 of a year) and which, more importantly, will help us to better care for God’s creation.  And so our latest adventure began.

[Continue reading past the break to follow the rest of this phase of our adventure.]

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