Boiling Diapers and Missing You!

Dear Bloggy-blogosphere,

I have been missing you!  But alas, I have had NO TIME to post.  Unless you count the 20 minutes I was asleep on the couch this afternoon.  I don't, because I regard that time as necessary for me to function for the rest of the day.  :-)

ANYway, here are some things I have been up to tonight:

Boiling my cloth diapers!  They have really been smelling strongly of ammonia, so Chris finally did a google search about how to strip diapers of their ammonia smell.  We are boiling ours for 30 minutes.  If you do this, and have PUL in the water, you have to let the water cool before you take the PUL out because it will deform if you take it out when it's hot.

Other things he found to do to reduce the ammonia build-up in the future is add vinegar to the cold rinse cycle before washing them.  Although, this is also said to be bad, because lots of vinegar in your washing machine can wear the plastic parts inside more quickly.  I'll let you wrestle about whether or not to do that on your own.  :-)

Also here are the leftovers from dinner:

Leftover rice with leftover chicken cut up in it, homemade tortillas, grilled peppers and onions, and carrots on the side.

A quick batch of chocolate pudding for dessert.

And finally, there are TWO full bags of apples in my kitchen waiting to be made into applesauce. The guy downstairs has an orchard at his house, and he just leaves them next to our door.  That pretty much rocks.  :-)

Have a great night!  Thanks for reading my update!  :-)

Cloth Diapering

This is just a quick pic I took after I folded my diaper laundry. I haven't posted much about cloth diapering, but it's going pretty well!  I even made some for my SIL who is going to pop at any second! :-)  I made one for John, too (had to try it on him first before I could make them to give away!) They turned out really cute-- they are all-in-one diapers.

So I just thought I would tell you about my collection, and then maybe give a few insights I've had... 

I have:

• 6 covers
• 18 'prefolds' (but I think they are technically called 'flats' because they don't have to be folded; they are contoured)
• 4 mother ease all-in-ones
• 4 kushies 10-22 lb. all-in-ones (technically may be called all-in-two?) -- not great on the cloth diaper lingo
• 4 extra soakers to add to diapers to make them absorb more liquid
• 2 homemade small covers
• 1 homemade super-cute dinosaur all-in-one
• 6 kushies 6-10 lb. all-in-ones
• a bunch of cloth wipes of various materials and sizes

What have I spent?

I bought the covers, prefolds, mother ease and newborn kushies at a yard sale for $55.  I figured that would really be all I needed.  And reallly, it was.  My MIL bought the kushies on clearance for a total of $24.  And I would guess the dinosaur one cost about $6- $8 to make. Plus, I took a class at Jo-Ann's to learn how to make covers.  The class was $35 and the materials were $40. 

If I include the price of the class in the total, that's $162.  Without the class, $127.  I would consider the class more of a "learning to sew better" cost. 

I have abandoned the cloth wipes because I was having problems (it was just the one more thing that sent me over the edge) keeping up with making the solution to keep them wet and then having fresh ones on hand.  I do make my own disposable wipes using paper towels. I would say it takes one month to go through an entire paper towel roll in wipes.  You cut the roll in half and then it takes 2 weeks for me to use each half. I'd say the rolls we buy at Sam's Club come out to about $1.50 per roll. That's not too expensive for me!  When I am not making my own disposable wipes, I buy them from amazon at about $18 for a lot-- about 4 months worth of wipes.  That's more than making my own, but still less than five dollars a month.

Why did I choose cloth diapers?
I originally chose to cloth diaper my baby because it was going to be cheaper.  The thought of cloth diapering was confirmed to me when I came across some at a yard sale.  I could not pass up $55 for an entire cloth diaper collection.  After I bought the diapers, we started cutting out as many chemicals from our lives as possible. I already used homemade cleaners and soap nuts for laundry, but we also started to really pay attention to the additives in food that we eat.  Why would I then use diapers that are laden with chemicals and touch my sweet baby's bum all day, everyday for two years? Well, at this point I just wouldn't.

I do, however, use disposable diapers on occasion.  For instance, I used them when we went to Hershey Park for the day.  And, I also use them when I go to my MIL's house. I buy the Huggies Natural diapers or Seventh Generation diapers, but I view these breaks as necessary for me not to get all legalistic and burnt out.  I am not doing this to make my life insane, and I am not going to let it stress me out (I have enough other things in my life to stress me out!  Like my four kids).  See my above comments about using reusable wipes. 

How do I start?
Well, I started by just buying some and going from there.  I got lucky, though, with the yard sale.

Most normal people would want to do a lot of research about what kind of diaper might work best for them, and tackle all the crazy cloth diaper lingo before they just dove head first into owning them.  For all you normal people out there, I will direct you to Katie over at Kitchensteawardship.com.  She has done lots and lots of research and comparing brands in everything from how much each diaper holds, to how they do on leaking, what to do about poop, etc.

Here are her posts:
Cloth Diaper Rookie post with vocabulary
Cloth Diaper Myths Revealed
Cloth Diapers Absorb-- How Fast?
Cloth Diapers Absorb-- How Much?
Pocket Diaper Review
Wet Bags
Fitted Cloth Diapers

Katie has a bunch more posts about cloth diapering, so if you're interested, there is a wealth of knowledge to be read over there.  I could spend hours reading it myself. :-)

Final Thoughts
So far I am loving cloth diapering.  I just entered the world of 'grown-up' poop, because we started feeding John table food recently. We'll see how everything holds with that.  :-) But other than that, I guess that's it.  I am hoping for a sunny day soon, as my diapers haven't been hung out to dry in awhile, and that is SO IMPORTANT in keeping them nice and white.  Until next time, .... :-)

Baby Preparations... :-)

In a few short weeks we will have an addition to our family!  And, since I am continually losing my mind anyway, and it's our fourth child, and I'm fed up with buying diapers, and they are too expensive, and they cause diaper rash, and all the chemicals in the diapers are probably as good as or worse than the chemicals in all the processed food we stopped buying, (Like how I tied food into this post that has nothing to do with food?!) I decided, I might as well try cloth diapering! 

Last week it was nice enough to wash them and hang them all out to dry.  They look so cute and white out in the sun!