Paradigm Shift

So I just couldn't quite stay wordless on wordless Wednesday.

My kids are both napping right now.
My kids are both wearing cloth diapers right now.

Some may cheer, some may laugh, (I'm doing both!) but we are giving it a go.

I was raised in cloth diapers, as were my sibs. That was back in the late great days of diaper services and giant pricky diaper pins, with stinky plastic pants/liners. When I found out I was pregnant with Luke, I immediately looked into cloth diapers, hoping that I could find a diaper service for two reasons:

1. I hated doing laundry.
2. My washer and dryer were tucked away down in the basement of our 100+ year home, along with messes of dust, spiders, mice, and other heeby jeebie sort of critters. I just could not picture myself lugging diapers up and down two sets of stairs to wash poopy diapers.

Alas, there were no diaper services in my area.

I then looked into buying cloth diapers, and was amazed to find that they are not the cloth prefold diapers of my childhood. Nooooooo. These days there are a MILLION options, all a bit nebulous and intimidating with names like "happy heinys" "Fuzzy Buns", "Bum Genius" etc etc....There were all of these scary foreign to me concepts like "Stripping", "Lanolizing", PUL, pocket dipes, fitteds, prefolds etc etc.....It made my head spin. Theres fleece, wool, and all sorts of other covers, and inserts, and then there is hemp, or bamboo, or microterry, or on and on and on........there is even the "other/pseudo" cloth, the G Diapers, which have flushable inserts. I got overwhelmed, and decided that given my distaste for laundry in general, and my dingy laundry doing place, and the whole "who knows whats coming with the birth of this kid who may have colic or never sleep or make my life miserable " roulette of uncertainty that having your first baby entails, I was out. So to the "sposies" I went. I have to say I liked them. We had great luck with our kids skin, they hardly ever had a diaper rash, and the disposable diapers generally did exactly what they were supposed to.

Fast forward to now, and it just kept hitting me over and over that it was time to try cloth. My objections were suddenly gone ~ My laundry room is right outside of the kids bedrooms. I am not as on the run these days with two kids, we spend lots of days at the house or at the park, and the extra load of laundry really isn't that big of a deal when I am already doing laundry for 4 people. Add to that the fact that Luke's ringworm would not go away ~ encasing it in plastic was the perfect wonderful warm unbreatheable environment for some fungus to thrive. Then there was the super soaker issue ~ Luke SOAKS his overnight diapers, and lately they have taken to exploding. When diapers explode, millions of creepy ultra chemical laden plastic~ish balls of mystery poison spill out. I saw a little of it up against Luke's skin this last week and just freaked, its just so unnatural. So between his issues and having this sweet little pure newborn Julia, coupled with the knowledge that these cloth diapers can work for Luke, for Jules, as WELL as for any future kiddos we are blessed with, and the decision was finally made to at least give it a shot.

For about the 5th time since I originally got pregnant I began scouring the Internet exploring my options. For the 5th time I read what I could understand (its a bit dizzying at first ~ So many options and you really don't know the pros or cons of anything in particular). For the FIRST time though, after filling my virtual shopping cart, I hit "buy". The first bits arrived yesterday. Bum Genius 3.0's. My daughter and son have been in cloth diapers for all of.....well......24 hours now. Revolution it is not. I just want to see if there is a better way for us. It may be something I do part time, it may be something that I find I hate, or does not work for us, and it may well be something that I fall in love with and can soon toss CD'ing acronyms around like an old pro. We shall see.

I will keep you posted.

This pic is unrelated to this post, but darn ain't my little girl getting big?

(In the pics below, you can catch them in action in their new cloth digs :))