cloth debate

When Maya was a baby I used cloth diapers for about 6 months. Then, we put our house up for sale and I had enough to deal with trying to keep the house immaculate for showings, and so I decided to use disposables… NEVER LOOKED BACK.

You see the switch made my life so much easier (yay!)… but it doubled our garbage (boo!). It’s kind of sickening, but I needed to do it.

Then, once daycare started, there was no choice, I had to continue with disposable diapers. I started out with Morgan using the beloved Pampers. They work so darn well! But my conscience is killing me so now, Morgan is 2 months old and I’m going to try to switch to cloth. I have all these cloth diapers from last time, it would be a shame not to use them. I used the old fashioned prefolds last time, but I also have some Mother-ease diapers that I’m excited to try out. Either way, I’ll save loads of money and garbage… as long as I can keep up with the laundry.

Wish me luck!

Privacy

I walked into the kitchen where Maya was playing with her magnets at her little IKEA table this morning. I sat down at the computer and she immediately said, “No, Mommy, please go out of here”.

I resisted because I wanted to use the computer saying, “No Maya, I want to use the computer.”

She replied, “No, please Mom, go to the living room. Go to where I play. Please don’t look at me. Please some privacy!”

After much insisting on Maya’s part that I leave, I finally gave in, took the laptop with me into the living room and soon after heard a lot of grunting and groaning from her location in the kitchen. I realized, she asked me to leave so she could fill her diaper!

Most kids at this age I’ve heard tend go an hide behind the sofa or go into another room for this, but not my daughter, with her sense of entitlement–everyone else must leave the room so that Princess Maya can have her privacy–and where did she learn the word privacy anyway?!

road trip conversation

Actual conversation that took place in the car on a recent 3 hour road trip I took with my husband, Chad, and our 19 month old daughter, Maya:

Maya: I have a poop.

Me: Oh no, she’s pooping.

Chad: Should I pull over?

Maya: I see the poop! (Smiles at poop leaking out of diaper.)

Me: Yes, pull over at the next gas station. Maya, I see the poop too, but don’t touch the poop.

Maya: I like poop. (Reaches for mess in diaper.)

Me: It’s okay, but don’t touch poop. (Mom grabs Maya’s hand to prevent BIG mess.)

Maya: I want to touch the poop. I love poop (said while making self-hugging gesture).

Me: We’re going to stop and change your diaper. Just hold on.

Chad: Don’t worry Maya, we’re going to change your poop, Dad is pulling over.

I’m wondering when our lives will evolve so that we can, once again, discuss something other than poop??

and so it begins

It’s official–we’ve started potty training. Maya’s only 19 months old, and I’m not all crazy with desire for her to be toilet trained at an early age. But there are a couple of reasons why we’re starting now. The first and most important reason is that she’s showing signs of readiness. One big sign I noticed is that whenever she has a poop in her diaper she immediately tells me and says, “mommy  change it, please?”. She obviously doesn’t want to sit in it for very long and is aware that it’s happening-yay! Another reason why I want to start now is that I’m a teacher and I am only going to be at home with her for another 6 weeks before I go back to work full-time and she begins daycare again, and then it will be much harder for me to follow through with this kind of thing at my end. Working life means I don’t get a lot of time with Maya during the week, and it’s not really effective to just potty train on weekends.

So, for starters, I did a lot of reading about approaches to potty training and we bought some supplies, namely a child-sized potty and a fold up child’s seat that sits on top of our regular toilet. See below:

Yesterday, at the advice of one of the websites I read, I took Maya’s diaper off for several hours in the afternoon and I let her run around diaper-free. I don’t really want a mess in the house so we played outside with the little potty close at hand. I repeatedly sat Maya on her potty and she didn’t actually “go” in it, nor did she go anywhere outside. Then, we came inside, I put a diaper on her and she immediately asked for the potty, so I took her diaper back off and hopefully sat her on the toilet only to realize that the diaper in my hand was very heavy… she had held it all that time and then let it go the moment I put the diaper on her! Kind of annoying, but also good because it showed me that she could control her bladder a bit.

Today is day #2. At her request, I sat Maya on the potty for a long time in the morning. She played with toilet paper and made herself quite comfortable, but nothing happened. Then, I thought of one strategy I had read about: I took one of Maya’s toys and sat it on the little potty and said that it was going “pee pee” and then of course I reduced myself to the humiliating point of making “pee pee” sound effects. Meanwhile, Maya was sitting on the big potty and she started to go “pee pee” after seeing the toy that was pretending to do so. This was very very exciting! I shouted, “hooray” and made a really big deal about how great it was. She was quite pleased with herself and has since then used the potty a second time today! I know it’s the beginning of a very long haul here. Nevertheless, I’m excited that we’ve already had some success. Hopefully, it continues without too many accidents. Next up: we’re getting big girl underwear!

The Importance of the Onesie

Like all toddlers, Maya is curious. She’s curious about new things, especially her own body and more recently, her poop. The weather here has turned warm and summery and so I’ve been dressing her without the onesies and only putting her in one layer of clothing. Afterall, she’s 18 months old now–getting a bit big for the diaper shirts, right… well, actually no…

We were on our way home from a BBQ two weekends ago when she had a giant leaky poop in her car seat which led to her seeing the poop that was leaking and deciding to touch and play with it. Add to that the fact that my daughter is always sucking her fingers, she then took her poopy fingers and… well you know what happened next. My husband and I screamed “NO MAYA, YUCKY POOP! DON’T EAT THE POOP”. Then, about a week later she woke up early in the morning with a mess in her diaper that was as big as the BP oil spill–I kid you not! And she decided, since there was no onesie to stop her from accessing it, that she’d stick her hands in her diaper and find out what all that “stuff” was. When I came in her room she had a fist full of it and was smearing the filth all over her blankets, crib and she was touching her face, hair and body. It was a disaster, the likes of which I hope never to see again. So, I’m sticking with the onesies for now. Limiting diaper access seems to be the best plan for the moment.

The most annoying part of all of this is that when I share this story with other parents, they say, “oh my kid never did THAT!” which just makes me feel super duper lucky… lucky lucky me with my curious little monkey!

Candida bottom

Maya had a pretty wicked diaper rash for the past few days and there was just something different about it. She had these red bumps on her bum and the whole thing was kind of raised up and splotchy, which made me wonder if something besides a plain old diaper rash was developing. Plus, I was using a pretty powerful diaper cream on it that always seems to work, but it was getting worse and worse–very odd. I thought perhaps it could be a fungal infection (don’t ask me why this occurred to me?) so I googled it and saw a picture of a baby’s bottom that looked exactly like Maya’s in this article. So, just to be sure I took her to a nearby walk-in clinic where the doctor confirmed it was, in fact, candida. Strangely, he told me to get canesten cream that is the same strength as the stuff used by adults (1% clotrimazole). I was directed to apply the cream to the rash 2 or 3 times daily for 6 days to clear things up. I got the treatment going today and am already seeing some improvements. Funny because I’d heard of babies getting thrush in their mouths but not on their bottom. I’m glad I managed to sort it out before it got worse, she was already starting to complain when I changed her diaper–poor kid!

Accept the Poop

I know babies poop a lot and I accept this, or at least I’m trying to. I used to have a very hard time with poop. This was in part due to the fact that, as an elementary school teacher, I had one haunting encounter with a Grade 2 student… let’s just say my hair was involved. Now, breast milk poop was messy but it smelled like roses compared to Maya’s more recent fare which is the result of all the new and exciting solid food she eats. Not only is the stink starting to get to me, but today I tried to pull back her diaper to check her “status” and sunk my finger into a whopper–yuck! I know it’s not mature for me, as a mom, to go on about this… I have to just accept that poop is a part of my life now and it’s going to be for a long while still!

Diaper Rash Nightmare!

For our summer holiday this year, my husband and I decided to drive (with our seven month old baby girl, Maya) from our home on Vancouver Island to a vacation resort in Columbia Falls, Montana. The plan was to take our time and split the 15-hour long drive (plus a 1.5 hr ferry ride) into three days. Along the way we planned to visit friends and family members who lived in various towns in the interior of British Columbia. Day 1 went well as we hopped on the ferry in the morning and drove to visit friends in Penticton, BC. The trip was about 8 hours, but only about 6 hours of driving and we stopped for the baby quite a bit along the way. We had a great visit with our friends who also have a new baby close to Maya’s age. The one thing I noticed that first night was that Maya’s little bottom was getting pretty raw with diaper rash, but I figured it would heal up in no time, as it usually did.

The next day we had a 7-hour drive ahead of us… with the baby it was more like 10 hours. Our plan was to arrive in Kimberley, BC in time to have dinner with some family members we hadn’t seen in quite some time. During our drive we noticed that Maya kept having bowel movements every couple of hours (very unusual), but because we were driving we didn’t always notice it immediately (although we were checking as often as we could). After about 4 diaper changes Maya became very fussy, we stopped to change her again and found that her little bum was so red and raw that it was actually bleeding! She was screaming in agony as my husband held her writhing body still while I tried to clean her up as gently as I could. Honestly, I’d never seen her in so much pain. Her little fists were clenched and shaking and she was crying intensely with tears streaming down her face. She held her legs stiff and straight in an effort to stop me from getting at the area where she most needed to be cleaned. My poor baby! I was fighting back the tears myself and I didn’t know what to do.

After texting some more experienced family members (who had babies of their own) about our situation, I was advised to go to a park, find some green grass and let Maya roll around naked on the grass. Not only did she love this, but the fresh air helped the situation considerably. We drove the last leg of the trip with the baby fussing quite a bit. We made it to Kimberley where we found she had soiled herself again. We decided to bathe her to get her really clean, but the bath (which she usually loves) was like torture for her little sore little rear end—oh the screams… I felt terrible. In the end, we decided to stay an extra day & night in Kimberley to let the baby have a rest from the driving. We gave her lots of diaper-free time to heal up and recover from the whole situation.

So, why did the rash get so bad in the car? I don’t know for sure why she kept pooping and why her bum was such a mess but I have some theories. One of our cousins told us that one of the times babies are most likely to have a bowel movement is when they are taken out of a car seat. Since we were driving and stopping frequently, we took the baby in and out of the car seat many times throughout the day. I also fed Maya organic baby carrots from a jar. Up to now I had only ever fed her baby food (including carrots) that I had made myself. Even though this pre-made stuff was organic and claimed to be comprised of only organic carrots and water, it seems to be quite acidic and I think it contributed to the pooping & rash problem. Plus, I usually don’t feed her that much solid food, but since we were driving, I was feeding her more in her car seat as we drove. Perhaps the large volume of solid food was a little too much for her system.

There was no way I was going to risk going through the same thing again, so on the way home, we drove to my parents place just outside of Calgary and then my husband drove back home alone while Maya and I decided to travel by air, turning 12 hours of driving into a quick one hour flight—much better!

Washing Cloth Diapers

I learned a few new things about cloth diapers today while I was shopping at Mothering Touch (these facts are primarily for pre-fold diapers, not the 2-in-1 systems like bum genius or baby kangas):

1. You cannot use regular zinc-based diaper creams on cloth diapers. Zinc oxide cream doesn’t come out in the wash and it ruins the diaper’s absorbency. If you do want to use those creams, you can insert a small strip of polar fleece into the diaper (also referred to as a fleece liner) which will prevent the diapers from being permanently damaged by the zinc cream.
2. A diaper salve called Baby Bottom Better is safe for use on cloth diapers.
3. If your diapers start to have a smell (usually smells like ammonia), it’s because they need to be “stripped” once a month. “Stripping” is a way of getting out any residues from detergent that has built up in the diaper over time and made it less absorbent and smelly. Stripping diapers involves washing them in hot water and 1 cup of baking soda (but no detergent). Then, immediately after the baking soda load is finished washing, run the diapers through an extra wash cycle with NOTHING but water (i.e., no detergent or other cleaning products). If you do this monthly, your diapers will smell good and maintain their absorbency. 
4. Hanging diapers in the sun will help to naturally bleach out any stains that remain after washing. Oxygen bleach is also an environmentally friendly alternative to chlorine bleach, and it won’t break down your diapers.

Thanks to the ladies at Mothering Touch for all their wonderful diapering advice. Another great place to get advice on caring for pre-fold cloth diapers is the bummis website. Hopefully, these tidbits will help many of you cloth diaper folks to succeed at what you do and keep at it! Remember: you’re helping the environment and saving money!