Baby Clothes in Boxes

So Thora's first year has really come to an end. I mean this is a pretty obvious statement, since Thora is 14+ months old. But it really hit home, the other day when I finally got around to boxing up her first year clothes. And there they all are. Boxed up. Ready to go down in the basement. Ready for some hypothetical future child. Or maybe not. Anyway, it was an occasion for reflection, nostalgia, all that good stuff. Here are the five boxes of first-year clothes:


Here is one of my favorite outfits of hers, a green, waffle-y, footed-jumper:



Here are couple old photos of Thora in this outfit, at just under 2 months old, almost exactly one year ago from this post.

Memorial Day Weekend: Codman Farm

On Sunday, we drove out to Codman Farm, and languished in our perennial fantasy of scrapping it all, and buying a farm. Thora got into the spirit as well. After we pulled up, she was itching to get out of the car. I unstrapped her from her car seat and set her down on the dirt ground of the dusty parking lot. And right away, she pointed and said, "Booo. Booo." There was an enormous tractor parked just feet away from our car, and I thought perhaps she was excited to be so close to it. However, there were also, about twenty feet away, two cows, calves really, laying down in the shade of the fence, lying snuggled together, facing each other with their heads resting on the other's back. I couldn't really believe that she was identifying the cows. After all, her version of "mooo" had for the last few weeks been "vvvvv," since that is the sound the cow makes in her old-fashioned noise-maker (the short cylinder that moos when turned upside down and then right-side up). But here at Codman Farm, just seconds out of the car, she was walking closer and pointing in the direction of the cows and say "booo." We got closer and I picked her up in my arms, to get a real sense of what she was pointing at. And there was no mistaking it; suddenly, right then and there, she went from saying "vvvv" to saying "booo". It was a small moment in the life of a parent when the clouds part, the sun shines down on your baby, and you watch as she fits another piece of the puzzle into place. Sean and I awed at her for a few minutes, shot some video of her new, more closely "moo-like" sound, commented to one another on how impressed we were ("I can't believe she spotted those cows so quickly and from so far away!"), and then started our tour of the farm.

We walked around, poking our noses in the various pens, cooing at the nuzzling, nursing piglets as they fell all over each other, their eyes closed, their noses rooting. We pointed out to Thora, and mimicked the noises of the sheep and lambs (all black ones), the goats and the kids who'd escaped from their pens, the turkeys and chickens, the ducks and the ducklings. There were baby animals aplenty there yesterday.

We wandered over past the community gardens and I coveted some gardener's tomato plants. Sean said, "Those are really spaced far apart," pointing to the 6-inch tall green, spiky, early tomato plants. And I said, "Maybe they expect them to be big and they'll need the room." And right then, I so pined to grow our own plants and herbs in a "real" garden. I've always had plants and herbs. Since Sean and I have been living together, since back on First Avenue in Tucson, I've grown tomato plants and various herbs to greater and lesser degrees of success. In New York, I had a container garden on our fire escape. I plan to have at least the same in our back yard here in Cambridge.

However, walking through the community garden yesterday, the sun hard and hot in the blue sky, punishing even, I felt the pull of nostalgia, to a rural life that I remember in patches of the short chapter of my childhood when we lived in Southern Illinois, the town where both my parents were born and went to high school, where they met and married the summer after my mom graduated high school, where both sides of my family originated and where my roots are clustered. I remember playing whiffle ball with the other neighborhood kids, and having to swat away the gnats from a raw patch on my leg, the result of sliding into one of the bases. I remember picking green beans from our garden; I remember a green garter snake trying to scale the inside of the screened-in porch, only to fall back down. I remember kittens being born. I remember a cat named Georgie and one named Snowshoes.

I was flooded with all these memories as we walked the dirt roads marked by the tractor wheels, and the desire to give in to the pull towards those gardens, those animals and their velvety muzzles, the tall flowers, that hard, punishing sun. We said, "Wouldn't Georgia (our dog) love chasing after those chickens." We said, "Can you imagine Thora out here?" We soaked up the sun and the blue sky. We swatted at the bugs. My gaze lingered on the green and sloping horizon of the fields. And then reluctantly, we got in our car, strapped our baby into her car seat, and drove down the road to get ice cream.

Back from New Hampshire

Thora and I traveled to North Conway, NH this weekend to cheer Sean on at the New England Rugby Tournament. It was kind of exhausting. The drive alone is 3 hours each way. The drive down, since we did it between 8 and 11 pm, was pretty uneventful for Thora, since she slept a lot of the way. But when we got there, she TOTALLY woke up. So much for our "plan" to transfer her from carseat to pack-n-play.
She ended up staying awake for close to an hour, what with the manic attempts at playing, the diaper change, the extra bottle, the inconsolable crying in the crib, the inconsolable crying in bed between us, until finally FINALLY Sean encouraged her to lay her head on his chest, while he rubbed her back, and she relaxed, even began to close her eyes. It was midnight after all. But still. If I didn't have to be absolutely still and silent (apparently letting on that I existed would break the spell that "Daddy makes it all better" and she would start to wiggle and fuss again) I would've broken out into such applause. And if I wasn't so so so incredibly tired.
To give you an idea of how tired I was: I was doing a bunch of car errands, something I very rarely do, and because of the car trips (dropping off the dog at the kennel, going to Home Depot for a replacement spark plug for the lawn mower, back to the other side of town to get the oil changed in the car), Thora took only ONE 30-minute nap...ALL DAY. At around 3:30, when I realized what had happenening, what was happening and how I was in no power to change it, while at Trader Joe's getting some groceries for the trip, I resigned myself to making the best of it by buying a bottle of wine to tuck into the suitcase and open once we got to the cottage in NH and after we got Thora to sleep in the crib there. I even splurged a little and spent a whole $8.99! I knew that it would take every ounce of patience, of creativity, of enthusiasm and compassion to keep little Thora going until we could get her in the car around 7 pm.
That's what I was thinking until Sean called at 5:45 pm and told me that he'd just that very minute finished seeing his last patient, that he still had an hour of notes left to write. So I'm looking at the clock and realizing that he wouldn't even be home until 7:15. Then we'd still have to pack up the car. With the phone to my ear I watched little Thora walk drunkenly around the living room. She seemed in good spirits, but seriously, it looked like she'd started drinking with lunch and hadn't stopped. And I realized, we're screwed. If I didn't have to drive us 3 hours to NH (Sean's neck was giving him a ton of trouble), I would've hung up and opened the bottle of wine right then and there. But as it was, Thora started to totally lose it around 5:15, begging for her bath: "ath? ath? ath?" So I bathed her and fed her a bottle at 5:45 and she was sleeping soundly at 6pm. I thought that would be fine. She'd sleep and we'd wake her up and transfer to the carseat, feeding her the second bottle that she normally gets before falling asleep as we drove away from the house. That was my plan, given the circumstances. That is, until she woke up screaming at 7pm. So a dose of ibuprofen later, we were wide awake when Sean came home. We loaded up the car, Sean sat in the back and fed her a bottle of milk. We pulled over so he could jump in the front seat, after which point, Thora went to sleep. And was asleep until I turned off the car in the driveway in front of our little cottage at the Spruce Moose Lodge.
Oh, I didn't mention that the first hour of that trip was spent driving into a torrential downpour through which it was difficult to see anything except for the brake lights of the cars in front of me. Even the white lane lines on the high way were faded and practically invisible. So as you can imagine, that's just how I wanted to unwind after a hectic and demanding day.
Back to my original motive, which was telling you just how tired I was. When Thora finally got to sleep a little after midnight, I lay there rigid, trying to get comfortable with a minimum of bed-creaking or sheet-rustling and I thought briefly and yet longingly about the bottle of wine buried deep in the suitcase, which was somewhere, and of the image I'd had of us opening it and relaxing and me regaling Sean with tales of Thora's sleep-deprived drunkenness, or us glancing through our copy of a Rough Guide to New England, planning out what we might do in between matches. But instead, there we were, me staring at the back of my eyelids, ready to fall asleep. That's what being a mom is sometimes, I think, laying in a dark room, motionless, having already been kicked multiple times by these tiny feet that you love, while a bottle of wine sits unopened in another room and a version of yourself plays out in your mind, and then you fall asleep.

Cloth Diapering: How We Roll

More than a few friends have expressed curiosity about our reasons and methods for cloth diapering. I thought I would lay out what we do and how we do it. This post is VERY long. But in it I discuss a bit about our research behind going cloth, the various products that we use, where we shop for our diapering supplies, how we use Chinese Pre-Folds with a diaper cover, and how we launder the diapers with minimal mess. So here goes:

We predominantly use Chinese Pre-folds which are the flat rectangles of cotton that you've probably seen for years used as diapers and burp cloths. We use a single pre-fold, folded into thirds lengthwise, with an outer, water-proof diaper cover. While this is by far the most budget-friendly way to go, there are costlier but easier methods. Chinese Pre-folds, frequently labeled DSQ, or Diaper Service Quality, are made by sewing multiple layers of cotton together. They are divided lengthwise into three parts, with the center panel having extra layers of fabric. So a particular pre-fold's absorbency is noted by the number of layers, (e.g.) 4-6-4 or 4-8-4. When folded in thirds and covered with a diaper wrap, you have a very absorbent, eco-friendly way to diaper your baby!

Before Thora was born, we were living in Manhattan and using landromats. Because we were using communal washing machines, we looked into diaper services, which pick up your soiled diapers, sanitize them, and then drop off a new batch of diapers to you. From my limited research--mostly word of mouth--my impression is that the environmental benefit of using a service is not that different from filling a landfill with one's disposables when you consider the water usage, the chemicals used to treat the diapers, and the carbon emissions of the delivery truck picking up and dropping off your diapers. Since you're not necessarily getting your same diapers back, the services must wash the diapers very thoroughly, perhaps using excessive water and maybe chemicals. (Like I said, I don't have concrete research to back this up and am happy to be corrected if I'm wrong!) Also, using a service is about comparable to the monetary cost of buying disposables. So for us, to be able to self-launder cloth diapers allows us to save money while at the same time pursue eco-friendly diapering.

We launder the diapers ourselves, which is quite painless. We have a washer and dryer in our apartment. (I'm not sure what we would be doing if we lived somewhere with communal washers. I'm curious to know if washing diapers in communal machines is a strict faux pas, or if there are people out there who do this.) Self-laundering keeps the cost of diapering Thora VERY low. There was the initial layout of diapers and covers, around $100; periodic purchases of the diaper liners, around $100 per year (more about these later); and store-bought wipes (which I wash and re-use). This method is much friendlier to our budget then regular disposable diapering. Granted, we are doing more laundry, which surely appears on our electric and gas bills. However, it's only about 3-4 extra loads per week (sometimes less when we're lucky and her poops aren't so messy). However, like most things environmentally-friendly in my life, I'm willing to shoulder the cost--in time or money spent--if there are tangible benefits. We throw away perhaps 1 disposable diaper per month and have 1 plastic grocery bag of garbage from our bathroom per week of wipes (the ones that have come apart after several uses or are too soiled to wash) and general bathroom trash. For us, the results are cut and dry.

There are some great websites and forums out there that provide information about cloth diapering. My first research was on diaperpin.com. It was there that I learned about how modern and easy cloth diapering has become. If you have the means, you can buy cloth diapers that are as easy to deal with as disposables. Since we did our research, I've seen posts on cloth diapering on the Boston Parents Network Yahoo group. For example, there is a personal cloth diapering consultant out of West Somerville with a website that looks interesting: diaperlab.com.

When we got around to purchasing our supply of diapers, we went with tinytush.com. We purchased mostly Chinese Pre-folds and covers to go with them. We've used ProWraps covers and Bummis Super Whisper Wraps covers, both of which we've been happy with. Additionally, we did try out 1 each of three of the most recommended pocket diapers. We went with a Fuzzi Bunz , a Happy Heiny, and a Bum Genius. (TinyTush.com now carries their own brand of pocket diaper and we notice that they no longer carry these brands.) These are a bit pricey, about $17.00 per diaper. However, they couldn't be easier. Anyone who can diaper a baby with a disposable, can diaper a baby with a pocket diaper.

Our stock consists of 5 covers and 18 pre-folds. You can definitely have more, which would mean bigger loads of laundry and less frequent washing... a good thing. These are our "during the day" diapers. While wet and poopy pre-folds go into their respective diaper pail at each changing, you can keep re-using the covers if the diaper is merely wet, or if the poop was contained and did not spread off of the diaper and onto the cover. So we usually only go through 1 or 2 covers a day and 5-6 pre-folds a day. (Thora is a frequent pooper, so if your baby only poops once, you may get away with only 1 cover a day.) At night, we put her in a pocket diaper, stuffed with two inserts--the insert that came with it paired with one of the few random cloth diaper/burp cloths that we've acquired along the way.

Since Pocket Diapers are pretty self-explanatory, I'll only spell out how we use the Chinese Pre-folds and Diaper Covers.

Here's a diaper cover.

It has velcro closures much like a disposable. So once the diaper is folded inside, you pull both up between the babies legs and secure just like a disposable.














Then I fold the pre-fold a) first down about 2 inches at the top to create a lip, and then b) into thirds behind the center panel.

Here is a close-up of the folding technique. There is a purpose behind this specific fold. The two-inch fold at the top creates kind of a lip, so that if Thora were to have a blowout, the lip catches the poop that tries to shoot up out the back of the diaper.

And by folding the two outside thirds behind the center panel, you have edges of the diaper that are, in theory, untouched by poop. That way, I have something to grab on to when picking the diaper up out of the cover and I can cup the mess in the center of the diaper without the poop falling or spilling out.

Then I put a diaper liner down. These thin, rice paper liners, are septic-safe (for most modern pipes) and look a lot like fabric softener sheets, without the filmy residue on them, of course. They are non-absorbent, so they only catch the solids. This way, when Thora poops, I just pull up the liner and toss it (and hopefully the whole mess) into the toilet and flush it. We buy Imse Vimse liners from kidbean.com. When Thora has merely a wet diaper, the used liners, like the diaper wipes, can go right into the wash with the diapers, and be re-used at least twice and often three times.

Now for the cleaning.

The wet diapers are put in a lid-topped garbage can lined with a plastic garbage bag. At the bottom of the garbage can, between the can and the plastic bag, I keep an air freshener.















The poopy diapers go in an old kitty litter bucket filled about 2/3 with water. The bucket has a latching lid which does a great job of keeping the odor down and Thora from investigating the bucket's contents. Yuck! There are people who are proponents of the dry pail method. We tried that and found that we kept being messier than we thought necessary. We switched to the wet pail method.

This is what we do: 1) We try to get as much poop as possible into the toilet. Often this is as easy as lifting out the liner and dropping it in the toilet. However, when her poop isn't perfectly solid and compact, that job may involve anything from using the diaper wipe to roll the poop off the diaper and into the toilet, to the slightly gross "dip and swirl" method. This is just like it sounds. You dip the diaper in the toilet, holding onto a clean end. Then you swirl and swish it around, and the poop, often liquid-y to begin with, comes off in the water. Then, with the aid of the trash can close by, I make the transfer of the wet diaper from the toilet to the wet pail. This sounds terrible, I know. But after a brief learning curve, I got the hang of it, and don't often get my hands or the bathroom messy. And if I do get my hands messy, well, that's what soap and water is for, right? 2) The poopy diapers soak in the water for anywhere between 30 minutes to a day or two, depending on when we do the next load of diapers. 3) We wash the diapers with hot water and a normal amount of regular dye-free detergent. Even though the load would be a "Medium-Sized" load, I set the washer to "Large," since we are going to add in all the water that we are using to soak the diapers. 4) The wet diapers go in, and then we dump the entire contents of the wet pail into the washing machine. This cuts WAY down on mess, since you're not "bobbing for diapers." You don't touch a thing. 5) Every couple weeks, we add a cup or so of vinegar to the final rinse cycle. No bleach or oxy clean, since those products are supposed to break down the diapers, shortening their lifespan. 6) Then all of the diapers go in the dryer. (As the weather gets warmer, I will try to do more air drying outside and sun-bleaching.)

So that's it. They are always clean upon coming out of the dryer. There is no evidence of odor or stains--except for the putty-colored stains from the Boudreaux's Butt Paste that we use as a diaper cream. Like I said, there was a learning curve. But now, doing a load of diapers is as mindless as any other chore around our place. And while a squirmy Thora is harder to diaper with the pre-fold + cover system, the struggle is worth the environmental benefit. And financially, I can't even begin to fathom all that we've saved. And to think, these diapers will be waiting for our hypothetical future children!

I hope this post has taken some of the fear out of considering going cloth. And if you think you might take the plunge, good luck!