Cloth Diapering (baby)

I used cloth diapers on my last baby (#3), and on baby #2 after she turned 1 year old. I wanted to use them with #1 at some point, but cost prohibitiveness kept me from being able to do that the way I wanted, I did have a few samples and liked them, but that wasn’t “from the beginning” and things just never took off — and so then baby #2 came and I wasn’t prepared and wanted to still do cloth, but $ being tight — a no go, until I got pregnant when she (#2) had just turned 1. So that was when we made it happen, started getting stuff for her, knowing it’d be there for baby #3 who’d not be far away, and got more stuff and I felt good about it, that another baby would profit from our diapering supply … another of ours, that is.

Thing is, baby #3 was out of diapers right when he turned 2 years. I didn’t get pregnant until 2 years after that, and lost that  baby at 9 weeks, and then that was 2 years ago as well, from now. Guess where all the diapering things have gone? Stuffed in the laundry room where things weren’t organized, cat’s peed on them or some of them, and then they got put in the garage to be “hopefully” sanitized and kept “just in case” but there they are in the corner and we can’t get to them now, planning a garage purge, but that’s hard work and only DH can do that.

In the days of cloth diapering in our home we had a not-so-good washer. It had a stop problem on the cotton setting, which was sort of a “wash a bit then auto soak forever” until you went down there and bumped the dial up a bit. That was good, in a way, but it was the beginning of nagging awfulness in that machine, the whole dial eventually went ballistic and you had to guess as to what setting you were using to wash everything. It changed constantly. Anyhow, it was a supersize GE washer we got at the end of 1996, and I wasn’t very fond of it, being just under 5’2″ I could barely get to the bottom of the washer to retrieve clothing in the first place. Sure it held a lot of clothing, but if you can’t get at it easily, what’s the point? Small or large loads were all the same for me basically, too deep for ease of retrieval.

We knew we wanted a different washer and just bided our time, not able to afford it most of the time, and then finally this past year a breaking point came. I was in early pregnancy, so it was Autumn, and I was sleeping on the couch in the basement, and woke up to find a flood in the hallway. The washing machine was messed up worse than ever, and we had a major middle of the night clean up on our hands and the smell haunts me in my mind still today. Ick.

We got an LG front loader and LOVE IT. I will love doing diapers in this machine.

But I have to get more, and there are other things too, things of baby gear type put into the garage to be stored, and got ruined by our country mice.

In some ways it’s like I gave everything away, but I didn’t, I did save things, but it’s the same in the end. We are starting over with baby stuff. I had strollers that I loved, and they are trashed. 🙁

I do hope I can get what I want, the diaper stuff that is, but one thing I see online is that the one store I liked, weebees.com isn’t loading, and I don’t know if they exist anymore or not, there are references to them online though … so … otherwise, I know I like Mother-Ease diapers and covers, and I’ve gotten some things from Green Mountain Diapers, both of those sites still exist, at the least.

I’ll have to do more research now. I’m getting into it, just vaguely so far, and know that IF I ramp up in finding things, I’ll go nuts wanting to get them and set things up, and don’t know if that’s possible yet … oh well. I have until June some-thing to get enough for the first couple of months. I’m due about June 18th, and if things go like they did with #3 and I can do a homebirth, it could go longer, to the 29th or so, or even into the first week of July … but even so, I want to be ready in the diapering department well in advance for the majority of things, and only have to “get some bigger things” later on.

Also it’s notable that I won’t know how big the baby is until it’s born. My first baby was 9 lbs 1 oz.; my next was 8lbs. something-oz. (I can recall exactly the ounces); my last baby was 8lbs even. They’ve been smaller each time. None of them were “tiny” but the last one was the smallest at birth and stayed smaller on average compared to his older two siblings (who were never “small” for their age.)