I’d like to start this blog by saying, for some of you, this may be TMI, as in “too much information,” but as I’ve said before, we cloth-diapering moms are not typically overly-squeamish so with that warning, I’ll continue.

After 23 months, I just had a visit from Aunt Flo.  That’s right. My monthly. My cycle. My friend. My period. After over nine months of pregnancy and then 14 months of breastfeeding (and still going strong, thank you very much) I wasn’t sure if I would ever get it again. And truth be told, I hadn’t missed it at all.

So anyway, as I was dealing with Aunt Flo and getting ready to use a maxi-pad, into the bathroom walks my four-year-daughter, Kate–Mommy wants privacy? What a ridiculous concept. Anyway, curious Kate asked about the “diaper” I was  holding. After I gave her a very simplistic, yet truthful answer, I started thinking. These pads are a lot like diapers and a whole lot of them end up in landfills every year. Surely someone had already invented a cloth version.

A quick internet search revealed that yes, indeed, cloth pads do exist and actually, they seem to get great reviews. One of the companies I found Gladrags even asks has a program that will donate their products to girls in Africa, living in poverty, who have little access to feminine products. A starter kit costs a little over $100 and comes complete with the specialty detergent and a small bucket with a lid (to keep near the toilet, I assume). Like using cloth diapers, this would be a great way to save money and put less trash into the landfill.

Another cool looking company that makes and sells cloth pads is called Luna Pads. Their pads have wings and come in dark colors, like black, with colorful trim. Personally, if I end up investing in cloth pads, I would go with black–it just seems to make sense, if you know what I mean! While on the Luna Pad site, I came across a very disturbing blog called The Moldy Tampon Turmoil. I hadn’t heard this story but I am pretty grossed out by the picture. The woman who discovered the moldy tampon only discovered because she accidentally popped it out of the applicator–otherwise, anyone who has used a tampon knows that you don’t see the tampon before you put it in–so who knows how many moldy tampons exist? Ewwwwwww!

The environmentalist in me is thinking maybe I should give these a try.  And since I have two daughters, I’ve already decided that I’ll be buying the girls each a set when they get their first periods. They’ll think this is just the way it’s done if I start them early enough–or at least I hope so. What do you think of reusable sanitary pads? Would you? Could you? Do you? Let us know what you think.

My husband and I thought that our family was complete with our two girls, Lauren now six and a half, and Kate, who just turned four. Imagine our surprise when we learned we were expecting a third.  And our shock when we found out I was carrying a boy!

We were both thrilled to see the boy parts on the ultrasound. We couldn’t believe it. We had been so sure we would have another girl. And we were fine with another girl. We know girls. We love baby girls and we already have lots of pink.  I was interested to see, other than the obvious, how boys and girls are different as babies, before the pressures and expectations of society’s gender rules would affect their behavior.

For Cooper’s newborn months, he was a sweet baby, rather androgynous as most babies are, and the only differences were diaper changes and blue clothes.  He was an avid nurser and loved mama best, but so did my girls.  He was colicky and loved to held and snuggled and was not fond of the car-seat–but my girls were the same.

I started noticing differences around the ages of six months when Cooper began to take an interest in toys. I made sure to expose him to both girls toys–which we had in plenty–and boy toys–which we were just starting to acquire.  If I handed Cooper a doll, he would glance at it and throw it.  If I handed him a block or a ball he seemed more interested.  Now in hindsight, I am wondering if throwing the doll was more about the throwing and less about disliking the doll. At almost 14 months, he loves, loves, loves to throw things.

By the age of 14 months, Lauren our first child, had 40 words. I know because we counted–I was much more on top of her baby book (don’t tell the other two!).  Cooper at the same age has a total of four words–mama, good girl (guh guh) which he calls our dog and bah (ball).  However, he pretty much exclusively says ball. He’s always on the lookout for them. The neighbors have basketballs in their front yard so he loves to stand on his changing table and look out the window pointing  and repeating “Bah, bah, bah, bah!”  When he was finding eggs, hidden in plain sight in the grass on Easter, he went around pointing and gleefully saying “Bah! Bah!” I have never seen a child so obsessed with balls. As a female, I have to say, I just don’t get it.  They’re boring. They aren’t fuzzy or necessarily colorful. They don’t have expressions or frills. But after doing a little research, I found out that the wiring in males brains makes them attracted to things that move.  Maybe it’s the old hunting instinct coming through.

I’d by lying if I said my husband and I weren’t thrilled and amazed by our little man and his emerging skills, personality and his pre-manlike love of the remote control. But I am determined to teach my little boy to give kisses–right now all I’ve gotten are a few fat lips because he also loves to head butt me. Sigh. At least we’ll be mixing up the girl drama with some head butting, right?

So I recently wrote a blog called Owen: A Cloth-Diaper Wearing Baby Potty Trained by 18 Months. In it I describe how my sister successfully trained her son by introducing the potty when Owen was around one.  Cooper turned one in February and so I brought it out.  The Potty.

When Cooper was 11 months, I decided to try putting him on the big potty, with the potty-seat on so he wouldn’t fall in. I wasn’t expecting him to pee but I wanted to let him give it a try.  Much to my dismay, he arched his back, straightened his legs and began shrieking.  I picked him up and he clung to me, looking at the potty with a mixture of fear and loathing.  I tried again.  This time he was holding onto me so tightly his knuckles were white. I gave up trying because I didn’t want to traumatize him.  At this point I realized that potty training Cooper might not be as easy as I had hoped, partly because his personality is much different than the personalities of his older sisters.

Both Lauren and Kate are what I like to call “Fireballs” because they both have fiery tempers, strong personalities and are extremely friendly and social–with everyone they meet. Cooper, on the other hand, is clingier and more attached to Mama.  (I have to admit, I secretly love it!). And while both of his sisters can’t wait to get on the mechanical horses that cost a penny to ride at the grocery store–even as young toddlers–Cooper wants nothing to do with them. In fact, he had the very same reaction to the horse as he did to the potty.

So, back to potty-training. I’ve also let Cooper run around diaper-less a bit so that he can learn how his body works and what happens when he pees.  So far he has peed on the floor at least half a dozen times, but luckily always on the hardwood.  Then, he usually tries to stick his hands in it and splash around OR he slips and falls in the puddle.  Oh well.  No one ever said potty-training was pretty–or hygienic.

So, as Cooper enters his fourteenth month, I am going to try to remain optimistic–and keep working slowly on introducing to the potty. Maybe I’ll give him some treats while he sits on it so he will have a “positive association.” I’m pretty sure I got that idea from the Dog Whisperer. Wish me luck!

Spring is finally here in Colorado!  The flowering trees decorate the streets in creams and mauves, the leaves on the trees are getting a little bigger and a little greener every day, and the lawn almost needs to be mowed.  The warmer weather means that the kids and I are spending more and more time in our backyard and this is a blessing since we have a small house. I’d much prefer to have the kids bouncing on the trampoline than the couch and swinging on the rope swing rather than from the chandelier!

What else does spring bring? Weather warm enough to start drying some of my laundry outdoors–including my Thirsties Cloth Diapers! Though I’ve asked my husband several times (ahem–hint, hint) he’s yet to get around to putting up a clothes line for me.  So instead, I end up draping clothes and sheets over the play structure, the wood pile and on the backs of the lounge chairs.  But my favorite place to dry my Thirsties? In the hammock. The rope hammock makes the perfect place to spread out my diapers and wipes and let them dry evenly on both sides.  I’ve been turning my All-In-Ones inside out at first and then turning them right side out again after a while. I also do this with my Duo Fab Fitteds and am sure to put the stained ones in the most direct sunlight.

Hanging clothes out to dry IS a bit more work than transferring them directly to the dryer and pushing a button,  but as cloth diapering moms, we’re already committed to doing a little extra work for the good of the environment and our wallets, right? So how much money can we save by line-drying our laundry? Well, let’s see…by doing a quick online search I found a very cool website that can tell you approximately how much money you save with each load of clothes that you don’t put into the dryer.  You’ll need to look at your electricity bill and find out how much you pay per kWh (kilowatt hour “a unit of energy equal to 1000 watts”).

When I put my Thirsties in the dryer, I usually have to dry my diapers for almost an hour.  This is because my current stash is made up completely of Duo Fab FItteds and AIOs.  My size one stash was made up of half Duo Fab Fitteds and half Duo Diapers. The Duos dried much more quickly.   To dry about 16 diaper or half my stash, it takes about an hour in my dryer. To help them dry more quickly I turn them inside out and make sure to unsnap the adjustable snap risers on the front. When I put my diapers outside to dry, I also turn them inside out.

I do an average of 11 loads of laundry a week–8 loads of clothes, sheets and towels and two to three loads of cloth diapers. Wow, that seems like a lot and I don’t even wash my husband’s work clothes–they go to the dry cleaners!  I found out how much we pay in our city for kWH (price per kilowatt) and plugged it in to the calculator on the website. Then I plugged in the average number of loads of laundry I do per week and how long my average drying time is. Clothes and towels take 40 minutes and diapers take an hour. This means that every time I hang a load of clothes, sheets or towels, I am saving 32 cents a load.  Every time I hang a load of cloth diapers, I save about 48 cents a load. Just line drying my diapers would save me $76 a year.  Line drying all of my clothes would save me approximately $231 dollars a year.  This means a savings of $20 a month.

Now that I’ve learned all of this–and I am glad I have, I have to say $20 a month doesn’t seem like much money to me. But there are other reasons that line drying is a good thing to do–it’s gentler on your clothes and cloth diapers and it reduces your carbon footprint. Combine that with the hundreds of diapers that aren’t getting thrown in the landfill and I feel like it makes a small difference. I can’t change the world alone but if more and more others start making their own small differences, we can have an impact on our planet.

This week is Spring Break. We flew to Orlando from Colorado, not for Disney, but to visit family–a brother, a sister and my parents. Having grandparents and aunts and uncles that mostly live in other states means that most of the traveling we do is to see family.  It’s nice that we can see so much family on this one trip.  We will be celebrating Kate’s 4th birthday while we are here, as well as having an early Easter.  Today we drove an hour to meet a high school friend of mine at the beach. Getting three little kids ready for a few hours at the beach–a fiasco!

It took us well over an hour to pack the bags, dress and feed the kids and load up the crew in our rented minivan. We still had to stop at a store to pick up snacks, baby sunglasses and a new bathing suit for Kate. While I ran in, my husband dashed off to a drive-thru coffee shop to pick up another necessity for our morning drive–coffee.

Finally, we were on the road, our destination plugged in to our GPS, and the children buckled safely in their seats.  I put my feet on the dash, clutched my “to go” coffee, and pondered how different this beach excursion was from many of the Spring Break road trips to Florida I’d taken as a college student.  Instead of feeling energetic and excited to cook my skin in the sun despite being up all night with the other spring breakers, I was feeling gritty-eyed and sleepy from a fitful night of sleeping with a one-year-old who wanted to nurse every hour.  I dozed behind my sunglasses. And before I knew it, we were there.

The sky was bright blue and clear–there was not a cloud to be seen. We hurried into my friend’s rental condo, changed into our bathing suits, and put sunblock on every exposed patch of skin we could see on all three of the kids. I covered my husband’s back with sunblock and everyone was ready to go. Everyone but me.  Since everyone was standing around impatiently and the kids were getting antsy, I slipped on my suit, had my husband put some sunblock on my back and we were were out the door and on the way to the beach. I figured I’d have time to put sunblock on my legs later. I didn’t want to  hold everyone up.

Twenty minutes later we were at the beach–with four children between two couples and three of them being mine. We put up an umbrella, laid out towels, organized snacks and  put sun hats (back) on the kids. It was at that point that I realized that I had forgotten Cooper’s swim diapers–and no, I do not have a cloth swim diaper for him—I should look into that.  However, cloth or not, I am sure the diaper would have been forgotten and so was his sunhat.  So much for being organized.  Dang. I was more worried about the missing sun hat than the swim diaper.  Disposable swim diapers are not absorbent–they really just act to keep any “poop nuggets” from floating out and I knew his boy bathing suit had a “net” with elastic around the legs. That would suffice.  When we gave the word, they all ran straight for the ocean, even Cooper.

Keeping three young children with zero sense of self-preservation from drowning in the ocean meant that sitting in the sun and reading magazines was not an option. There was always a hat to put back on a child, sand to wipe off a strawberry, or a water-bound child to chase instead.  Cooper’s lack of swim diaper didn’t seem to be a problem and he wore one of his sisters’ floppy brimmed hats.  Since he is still too young to protest wearing pink and purple, he kept it on and didn’t get burned.

We stayed at the beach for about 3 hours before we packed up, shook the sand off of the towels, rounded up the pails, shovels and flips-flops and trekked back to the minivan.  The kids quickly fell asleep in the air conditioning and I once again propped my legs on the dash and closed my eyes.  It had been fun and well-worth the cumulative hours of preparation to arrive and depart from the beach–but there was nothing relaxing about it. And I had the sunburned legs to prove it.