Fluffy and pretty!

It was time to order some new cloth diapers. The last time I had replaced my medium Fuzzi Bunz, Luke was in diapers. That meant that my medium diapers had been in near-constant use since... 2004? With this year's tax return, I ordered a few new FBs from Natural Babies. 

They came in the mail, and OH! They are so soft and pretty! Since this was my first opportunity to order girly-colored Fuzzi Bunz, I took full advantage. (TBH, I also ordered orange and red, but they didn't look as good with the others in the photos, so just imagine them, okay?) 

Why, why, why do people insist on using crinkly, smelly, chemical-laden paper diapers? These are so lovely to the touch. Would you wear paper underwear? Me either! So why make your child wear a trash bag on her bottom all day? 

I admit, I was a bit intimidated by the choices out there on the internet - so many cloth diapers to choose from. So I ordered one. Just one. It was a red Fuzzi Bunz. And I tried it on Luke, who was a year old at the time. And I was hooked. 

I was so concerned about the extra laundry, and washing poop in my washing machine, and all the horror stories (from middle-aged women) about cloth diapers - none of which are accurate about today's cloth diapers, I can tell you! These aren't your momma's plastic pants! These are pretty, and they smell good, and they're EASY! 

• I do not keep a pail full of bleach-water in my house
• I do not dunk dirty diapers in the toilet, and carry them, dripping and nasty to the pail
• I do not touch poop when changing a diaper or taking them to the washing machine
• I have not had to buy a million pieces of special paraphernalia 
• I save money by not throwing away my diapers after every use
• I save the environment by not discarding my diapers, not using a newly manufactured diaper for every diaper change, not buying more trash bags for my diaper-filled trash cans, not wasting gas transporting diapers from factory to warehouse to store to my home and then to the landfill. Yes, I use water and energy to wash my diapers. But how much water and energy does it take to manufacture and transport single-use diapers? And how much room do they take up in the landfill? YUCK! 

And can we just talk about poop for a minute? If you're a parent, poop happens. It's a fact of life, and you get used to it pretty quickly. Once your baby starts solids, poop takes on a life of its own. It needs to be dumped in the toilet after a diaper change - whether you're using cloth or paper diapers. Yep - go check the instructions on the side of your sposie diaper package. You're supposed to be flushing that poo before your sposie hits the trash! If you're not, well, then you're creating a big problem for our groundwater. (Especially if you also vax your kids. Which is an ENTIRELY different post.) So don't use the poop issue as an excuse for using your chemical-laden, crunchy (and not in a good way) diapers. Stop being a weenie and go to cloth. 

One last thought about cloth: I hear a lot of people whine about the upfront cost of cloth. Look at it this way - buying cloth diapers versus using sposies is a lot like buying a car versus renting one week-to-week. Sure, the upfront cost is off-putting, but which is cheaper in the long run? DUH!