I am so excited to share this post on cloth diapering. I actually got my inspiration for my blog title, Indisposable Mama, from cloth diapers because honestly, they have changed the way I view the world.
Let me be totally honest here even though my honesty is going to paint me in a really bad light. I used to hate, detest, despise anything natural. I preferred my air filtered through air conditioning; I preferred bottled water; I preferred processed food, and crazy as it sounds, the sound of organic yogurt used to make me gag. I know that last one doesn’t make sense, but some deep, dark part of me just believed that big, corporate crap was cleaner than natural products. Sad, I know.
And then I used disposable diapers on Magoo for two years, and all of a sudden, my perspective started to change. I saw just how much crap (literally) I was throwing into the garbage and landfills. The crap will decompose – the diapers, not so much. And it got me thinking about larger environmental issues which led me to think more about what we bring into our house and put into our bodies.
When I got pregnant with the Goose, I started to research diapering alternatives, and I discovered the whole world of cloth diapering. Online, I came across many enthusiasts (because us CD mamas tend to be a bit passionate about our choice), and I saw just how many options were out there.
It was scary to make that first initial investment in diapers because each individual cloth diaper is not cheap, but we knew that as long as they worked as expected, we would save a ton of money in the long run.
The Goose was small when she was born, so it did take a couple of months for the Fuzzi Bunz to fit properly, so we bought some prefolds for those early days, and now we use both types of diapers daily. In fact, she will be a year old in a couple of weeks, and we have only purchased two bags of disposable diapers: one when she was first born before we had a chance to get out to buy prefolds, and the other when we were out and about and totally forgot to bring any diapers with us.
I am now a cloth diapering fanatic, and I am proud to say that I have converted a few people over to the other side. I love how much money cloth diapering saves us. Up until the Goose started eating solids, we literally had to spend no money on her because we already had the diapers, and she was exclusively breastfed.
But even more than the money, the thing I like most about CDing is that we do not ever have to run out to the store to buy more diapers, and my husband never has to take a detour on the way home from work to stop and get diapers. Some people don’t believe me, but I really do think it’s much more convenient. (And it helps that my husband is used to working in a medical setting, so he has no problem laundering the diapers!)
And so this brings me back to what I was originally saying. CDs were my gateway drug into the world on the environmentally conscious. Now, we eat as cleanly as possible, and I’m looking forward to getting most of my produce from a local farmer’s market this summer. Hopefully next year we will be able to join a CSA. I try to clean with baking soda and vinegar, and I avoid fragrances in my home. And I now try my best to make quality food and home décor on my own because it just means more to me.
I guess what I’m getting at is that I am now trying to find quality, and I’m trying to avoid the quick fix. Everything in our culture is disposable, and I do believe it is eroding our values. And so I’m doing the small things I can think of to stand up to that culture. Will it make a difference in our world? Probably not. But I do believe it will make a difference in the values my daughters carry with them into adulthood. And that’s good enough for me.
