Three days before Christmas, Husband's father died. It was totally unexpected even though he wasn't in great health.We found him, but we got to see him the day before. So Christmas sucked. There were some bright spots, but a lot of Christmas was not fun.
We've been back a week and it's been all work. Bleh. Classes start next week, and I still have some prep to do but my syllabi are done!
I can feel the baby now. It's neat. I'm just entering month 6 and only started showing 2 weeks ago, but I have already had it with the unsolicited pregnancy and parenting advice. Since my only real mood swings so far have been rage, I'm expecting to slug someone at some point. Or at least say mean things. I thought that the people that know me well--like family--would remember that I used to teach at a daycare and that I've taken care of lots of babies and kids, including my nephew and niece, with varying personalities and quirks. I may be a first-time mom, but I'm not new to the whole baby caregiver role.
But I do have an advice request. If you cloth diapered, what did you use? I want to do that (supplemented with disposables as needed), and there is a diaper service in my area, but we're looking at doing it all ourselves too. There are so many options. I've been reading about cloth diapering all day.
I am curious what my university will say when I talk to them about a place to breastfeed/pump since they are required to provide one and I share my office with two other people. There is no obvious place that I can think of in my building that would work. We're crammed into every space as tightly as they can fit us.
This post over at the The Toast reflects almost exactly my own response to seeing the trailer for I, Frankenstein. I had an additional question though. I thought gargoyles protected humans from demons, so wouldn't that make the Frankensteins the bad guys?
EDIT: That should read ending month 6, not entering. I swear I can count just fine. And thanks for the advice so far. It helps.
8 comments:
We do our own cloth diaper washing. We get rid of solids in the toilet, then throw the diaper in the clothes washer, then rinse on cold right before we're ready to do a real load of laundry. Then we throw in the rest of the laundry and wash. We're LAZY. But it works for us.
There are two kinds that we like:
1. Fuzzibunz
2. Bum Genius
We used Fuzzibunz with DC1. They're a pocket diaper.
I like Bum Genius better because it's an all-in-one and less fuss, BUT it takes something like 2x as long to dry. Fuzzibunz I can just dry with a regular laundry cycle, Bum Genius I usually have to stick back in the dryer with the next load.
More than cloth diapering though, I love love love part-time elimination communication. Especially when you catch poo in the potty instead of the diaper. Doing it stress-free part-time is like the best of all possible worlds. Also it's addicting. We've got some posts on the topic if you're interested.
Also: I'm really sorry for your loss. How horrible. :(
Delurking for cloth diaper advice. We use Flip diapers (by the bum genius people, but it's a cover/insert system instead of all-in-ones). We wash at home, and it's not hard so far - all the diapers go in for a rinse cycle, then we add whatever else needs washing and run the laundry as normal. We line dry, they dry pretty quickly. This may get more complicated when our daughter starts eating solids (and therefore has less easily-rinsed poop) but it's worked great for four months.
@sarabeth, we find it easier with solids, because the poo just falls into the toilet without rinsing needed. But it is a good incentive to only feed healthy less processed food, because junk food produces nasty messy poos.
We had a great time with the cheapest, easiest system: chinese prefolds with snappi closures and a variety of covers (we liked bummis and fuzzibunz the best but any non-wool was great). The washing was super easy: wash every other day, first on cold with vinegar, then on hot with Bio-Kleen enzymes. When solid food made it easy we used rice paper liners and just tossed that in the toilet before we washed. No rinse, no soak, no nothing.
Best resource (back when I did voluminous reading on the subject) for buying and information was green mountain diapers. We had newborn, then infant, then toddler sizes. We used the same diapers for two kids then sold them to a friend. So awesome, so easy. Disposables for trips over 18 hours.
We used a wide variety of cloth diapers, but Fuzzi Bunz were my faves. My advice is to skip all the homemade diapers by little botiques. There are probably some winners out there, but I had nothing but trouble (which is really bad when a lot of them have waiting lists and you pay, but PayPal only gives you 45 days for disputes so I ended up getting screwed on a few occasions).
I didn't mind the cloth diapering--it really is cute! However, I finally realized the cloth diapers were actually making my daughter's rash worse and stopped using them. I have to admit it was kind of a relief. I did every thing humanly possible to keep my diapers super clean, but they always had a bad smell to them. It was maddening.
We have the opposite problem with my daughter (another reason we have loved elimination communication)-- she seems to be allergic to most disposable diapers.
This is all very helpful, everyone. Thank you! Husband is all read up now. I found a for-dads site that is way lass scary than what I had been reading. Between that and you guys, I feel like I have a much smaller and more manageable list of options.
And there's a baby boutique in town that has a once-a-week session where you can come in and try out all of the brands they carry. They also apparently host exchanges. Armed with your suggestions, we are going to go in see the differences.
I am very glad to hear about the lazy washing. The washing routine of some of the moms on the cloth diaper subreddit is intimidating. We are lazy housekeepers, so knowing that you can do mixed loads is comforting.
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