Diaper duty

Posted on January 4, 2009 by Heather Laura Clarke

As a kid born and raised in the 80s, I wore disposable diapers. When I got older and began babysitting, all of those kids wore disposable diapers. I love patting a baby’s butt to get that crunchy, plasticy Pampers sound through their sleepers.

But now, somehow, I am hearing lots of talk about cloth diapers. Better for the planet, better for the baby, blah, blah. I only paid attention when I heard how they were much, much cheaper than disposables.

Since Darling Husband and I are not mega-rich — as in, there is a good chance our baby could end up wearing empty Cheeto bags with leg-holes — I was intrigued.

I did a bit of searching and saw that these are not the white-handerchief-fastened-with-a-safety-pin kind of diapers I was picturing — which I probably got from various cartoons. The new ones are made of fleecy-looking fabric, and have snaps and ruffles and cute patterns.

I like! I like! Tell me more!

Mommies and Daddies with lotsa cash can hire diapers services that pick up the dirty ones and drop off clean ones, but for the rest of us, here is how it appears to work:

I’m sketchy on the details, but it looks like you take the poo-diaper, take off some kind of pad, swish it in the toilet to get the poo off — or something equally gross — and then put it in your washing machine.

And you would wash all of the diaper pads together, as not to poo-ify your clothes, towels, etc. And then you dry the diaper pads, and they are good to be re-used. Moms, does that sound right?

It definitely seems less expensive than the Pamper/Huggies route, because even the kid-less know that disposables are costly. If you buy cloth diapers, you are spending much less, but have to factor in laundry costs, extra work, etc. Sadly, though, you don’t get the cute crunchy pat-pat sound.

I am leaning towards the cloth route — for the cash factor, not so much into the tree-savin’ — for home, but using disposables for travel/going out, etc.

I am not sure what you would do with a fouled cloth diaper in the middle of the mall, but the idea of somehow transporting it home does not sound pleasant …