There was a time when I wanted to save the earth. Well, I still want to save the earth; Let's say, there was a time when I thought I could singlehandedly save the earth, and by God, I was going to. That was the time when I believed that every disposable diaper that ended up in a landfill was another nail in Mother Nature’s coffin. And thus, naturally, when I was pregnant, I decided I was going to use cloth diapers on my baby. I was going to make a difference. Choosing cloth diapers over disposable ones was totally going to make me a better human being and make the earth a healthier place, and basically everything would look like the Coke commercial at the end of Mad Men, etc. Done and done.
I did oodles of research on all the different types of cloth diapers. I looked at purchasing them all myself and I looked at cloth diaper services. I talked to friends who had gone the cloth diaper route, both with services and using their own, and I made my decisions. I bought adorable diaper covers in all sorts of patterns. I watched YouTube videos on how to fold the pre-folds effectively, so that nothing leaked. I practiced. I spoke with the service I decided to use and signed up. I even added “one month of diaper service” to my baby shower gift registry.
Then I had my daughter, and reality set in. My reality is not every parent’s reality, to be fair. I know lots of families who successfully used cloth diapers for the first year or more of their baby’s life. But when you have an insanely skinny baby who poops more than is normal and doesn’t like to have the tiniest bit of wet cloth against their skin? After a few months of giving it a very solid try, I told myself that someone else can go save the bloody world, and went to go buy me some disposables, dammit.
And though it all worked out for us in the end, and I felt totally fine about my decision to abandon the cloth bandwagon and throw my contribution into my local landfill for the sake of my sanity and my baby's comfort, it wasn't a simple road getting from Point Cloth to Point IDGAF. Here's how that journey looked: