Cloth diapers

After a few days of getting peed on, I've gone back to using diapers and attempting to hold DS over the toilet often enough to maintain a claim on "potty training."  I've slowly converted to cloth diapers and now use cloth exclusively during the day, and disposables at night. I don't know if this is true of other cloth diaper users, but I found that I had to adjust all of the different types I've tried to fit my needs, and now I have a system that works pretty well. But I wonder if I am being too demanding in my attempt to find a diaper that is lightweight enough to feel like underwear but to hold a missed pee. Perhaps I should be looking at training pants instead. Until I do, here's the rundown of our current diapering system.

I have three different types of cloth diaper outers. One BumGenius, two Gro Baby and two gDiapers. I was given a bunch of infant size Crickett's Diapers by my lovely sister-in-law when DS was born. He is too big for them now, but I saw potential in the diaper doublers that came with the diapers. I found the fabric strips are just about the right absorbency for my one-missed-pee needs. I just needed a cover. So I bought the GroBaby diapers. I would put the Crickett's doubler in the GroBaby outer and it worked okay, but it was difficult to get the diaper on while keeping the doubler in place. So I ordered a trial kit of the gDiapers, thinking I could lay my extra doublers in the liner on the gPant. I just got the gDiapers a week ago, but it has been going pretty well. The only drawback to the gDiapers is that they aren't one-size like the GroBaby, so I'll have to order more once DS grows out of the medium, which he almost is already. (Darn babies, growing so fast!) So I use the BumGenius and GroBaby diapers for outings and when DS takes naps, and the gDiapers with thin liners for when he is awake and I'm trying to potty train. I use about four a day, depending on how attentive I am and if I hear him when he first wakes up (and catch him before he pees in the diaper).


All of this background to say: I need someone to offer a thin liner that allows parents to turn diaper outers into a training pant. I'd buy it.

Getting Regular

As of late The Boy and I have developed a part-time EC pattern that seems to work for us. I don't know if I'm betting better at picking up his cues or if I'm just holding him over the toilet more frequently, but we've cut back on diapers and rarely have a #2 miss. It's been five months since I started the EC experiment and I'm quite happy with the results. I'm hoping that by the time he is a year old we will be completely free from daytime diapers.

Our successes to date are as follows:

• The Boy will go in pretty much any toilet I hold him over - including in an airplane, which is quite loud and not just a little drafty.
• He doesn't poop in a diaper when I'm around. By this I mean that as long as I'm near enough to hear him, he'll grunt and look at me before he'll actually go. Number 2 in a diaper is a last resort for him.
• He doesn't pee when his diaper is off and he's not over a toilet. Meaning, I don't have to rush through diaper changes or into/out of baths for fear of getting peed on.
• On average, I catch five pees a day, with between three to five misses. On days when I am using a cloth diaper I usually only miss one or two. I think this is because I pay more attention. I am seriously considering moving to underwear during the day.

A couple of things I've learned that help me:

• Now that The Boy is standing, it's easier to use a pull-up style diaper instead of a tabbed one, which is a detriment to my use of cloth part of my motivation toward underwear. I most often use the Huggies Dry Pants, though I don't know what is available in other areas.
• Because I started EC by holding him over the toilet after he ate, I've continued that pattern and he now waits to go because he knows he will have a chance in the near future.
• Give yourself a break. Right now I don't do much EC if The Boy wakes at night. Sometimes he will look at the bathroom door, which has developed as an EC cue specific to his room. When he does that, I take him in, but if he seems too sleepy, I will just change his diaper and put him back down. For now, I'm happy with our daytime system.

Diaper Doubters

I get curious stares from folks when I take my 5-month old into the toilet at restaurants, and occasionally a brave person will step in to tell me that they have a better place for me to "change" my baby's diaper. I will thank them, then explain that he's actually using the toilet. The responses vary from skeptical to judgmental, but I smile and carry on. Regardless, people tend to ask, "Does it work?" The answer is yes. But since I'm hardly an expert, I've been collecting some resources for those who want more information from other parents who've tried EC.

James Woodford's article from The Sydney Morning Herald: Woodford was a skeptic but ultimately came around as his wife potty trained their fourth child using EC. (It's never too late to start!)

A portion of the article that I wholeheartedly agree with.

"Intrigued mothers, friends of Prue, tried the same method with their babies and also discovered it worked. As she explained, "What do you reckon the billions of mothers who can't afford nappies do?"

"Must be messy?" one interested father asked me, man-to-man.

"Not as messy as changing nappies."

And that's the real beauty of it: it's not messy because the mess goes straight into the dunny. It's not time-consuming, because there's no gruesome, nose-pegged wiping of rolls of fat and dimples. It's not complicated and it can't be more stressful for a baby than having daks full of do."

I dread the times when I miss DS's cues, because cleaning a diaper is so much more unpleasant than sending the waste straight into the toilet.

The web site Treehuger has quite a few posts on some eco-friendly diapering options, including infant potty training. Treehugger links to Adam Stein's post on Terrapass calculating some of the numbers of diaper waste. I found this idea interesting, but probably unlikely:

"I suppose a powerful economic incentive might be to give parents some kind of break on pre-school or daycare costs if their kids are potty trained by age 2. But it’s a bit difficult to imagine the government program that would result, and all too easy to imagine the pushback from those who don’t want the government involved in toilet training in any case."

From the Treehugger post about diapers/nappies, a list of companies trying for the hybrid biodegradable diaper/nappy:
Greenfibres offers flushable diaper liners.
Baby's Organic Nursery has cloth diapers with flushable liners.
Naty offers non-chlorine, recycled material diapers and claims to be "working towards a 100% natural disposable nappy."
Ecoquest plans to launch a diaper line.

"After considerable investment over a number of years, EcoQuest has successfully developed a new disposable nappy which, at the conclusion of six months independent scientific testing, achieved more than 90% of its maximum theoretical value for biodegradation."

Diaper Hyena offers a wealth of information about diapering of all kinds.

Diapers: Landfill vs Water-waster

Before my son was born I was fairly certain that I would use cloth diapers. I just couldn't figure out which ones, or how it would really work. There are waterproof outers, rubber covers, flushable liners, washable liners, diaper doublers, hemp, cotton, prefold, snap, velcro and tie. It was sort of too much for me, so the first few weeks we used disposable diapers that had been given to us at baby showers. I felt ok about it because the baby books said newborns are often too small for most diapers. Then my sister-in-law gave us a set of cloth diapers from cricketts diapers, which we used for a bit, but which are actually too hot to be used in non-air conditioned settings. DS was actually sweating through them, rather than wetting through them. I subsequently found that the liners could be used without adding too much heat, so I adapted the system slightly and lined a waterproof outer with two diaper doublers. But I digress. I think more people would use cloth if a company made it simple to set up a wash/wear system. If you buy disposable diapers, all you need is a garbage can. If you buy cloth you need a pre-wash bin, or a toilet for flushing the liner + a laundry basket for the outer, or 20 diaper covers and liners so that you aren't doing laundry every day. It's complicated and burdensome, so people stick with the simplicity of trash.

Here is my confession: I find myself putting DS more and more in disposables because he soils them less and less. It's like I can only be so eco-friendly, and training my infant to go in the toilet lets me off the hook for using cloth diapers. Makes sense, right? I'm in denial about my apparently minimal commitment to Mother Earth.

The diaper debate is ever present in parenting chats/blogs/forums and made an appearance on the NYT Motherlode Blog today. She asks if people are turning to cloth to save money in this poor economic climate. Many commenters indicated that it was a part of their decision, but most also said that their time was a key factor in deciding to go with cloth. Spending a minute swishing a cloth diaper around in water is no big deal when you are spending most of your day with your child, but if I worked full-time outside of my home, I wouldn't want to waste time pre-washing cloth diapers, (and then real-washing them later.) It is a huge question, and one that doesn't have an easy answer. For me, mixing cloth and disposable has worked the best. It's just so easy to be lazy, and so hard to remember how many tons of landfill waste we are adding each day.

Photo by Photocapy from Flickr used through Creative Commons License