Going green for St. Patty's day

No, we're not dying Ames' bathwater green or putting green food coloring in his Sippy cup. We're switching to green (cloth) diapers. I know, it's a little late in the game but I never got off my lazy butt to look into it. Then, at swim class another mom was putting one on her baby and I asked her about them. She said she'd tried them all and determined bumgenius ones were the best.


With someone else having done all the research for me, I figured, what the heck. I must relieve some of my landfill guilt. I read on Cottonbabies.com that

• Disposable diapers are the third most common consumer product in landfills today.
• A disposable diaper may take up to 500 years to decompose.
• One baby in disposable diapers will contribute at least 1 ton of waste to your local landfill.

So for the last stretch of the diapering lifetime, I'm going to give this cloth diaper thing a go. Ames is wearing only the third cloth diaper in a series.

Observations:
1) Ames appears to have some junk in his trunk (and I don't mean it's time for a nappy change). His skinny bohunkus now looks like a huge bubble butt! (Think the Wide End family from SNL)
2) Ames reports they're soft.
3) when depositing the poop into the toilet, warning: drop from a low altitude. A giant softball sized/weight bomb hit the water from 4+ feet in the air creating a splash that hit me in the eye! I shrieked, began splashing water from the sink into my eye (I'd already put eye makeup and mascara on earlier which resulted in a one-eyed Tammy Faye Baker look)

There's a lot involved to get going it seems. A bigger diaper pail is a must as you store 2 days worth of dirty diaps in there (if you're going green, you can't be doing laundry every day). Two cloth diaper pail liners (when one is in the wash, you've got another free to use) which you treat with tea tree oil to minimize the smell. Allegedly, the smell should be less than disposables as the poop gets dumped into the toilet before hitting the pail. Time will tell.

Washing the cloth diapers sounds a bit complicated as you have to do 3 wash cycles in 3 different temperatures which I suppose means having to monitor the washer fairly vigilantly. And it would seem that perhaps some green factor might be compromised if I indeed have to dry these in the dryer for the hour and half my diaper mom friend suggested. I may look into a clothes line for the back yard. I'm sure Nanaw will be thrilled with the white trash factor of that--to be literally hanging my well, I guess clean rather than dirty laundry out back.

Bum Genius makes a water sprayer gizmo that I hooks up to the plumbing in the back of the toilet to give the diapers a good rinse before chucking into the pail that I'm looking into. Sounds too like it's intended to serve as a Bidet too. Seemed odd to me that the info on the website casually mentions "The adjustable spray is gentle enough to be used for personal hygiene after childbirth." Like, every other day you're birthing a kid?

I chuckled at one reviewer's comment to that:" if you are intending to take advantage of [this] feature, let me just mention that while the adjustable spray is a plus, you will be in for a shock at just how FREEZING COLD the water in the line attached to your toilet can be. This particular feature has been used exactly once at our house."

Anyhoo, Will keep you posted on just how the cloth diapering goes in the Mayfield nursery. Crickets?