(PS: A little secret, if you see my hair in the loose side braid, I either haven’t showered in a while or I just showered and didn’t have time to blow dry. I’ll let you guess which one is the case here.)

*Misspeak: I mean to say that there are no disposable wipe fibers in the wash, not diaper fibers.

I cannot tell you the number of people who rolled their eyes at the glowing 30 weeks pregnant woman making such a lofty claim.

“No, but look! These aren’t your grandma (or mom’s?) cloth diapers. There are these gPants and they have little snappies where you attach a liner that is plastic-free and holds a cloth insert so that you just have to wash the insert and not the whole pant, OR they make these disposable inserts that you can even FLUSH…”

…and I lost them. I was simply an over-zealous, ideological preggo who probably thought she could have a natural childbirth too, but she clearly didn’t know what she was getting herself into.

But here we are, 6.5 months into the cleaning up someone else’s body fluids gig and I am absolutely in LOVE with our diapering system: gDiapers with gCloth inserts.

I wrote a preliminary explanation of how they work last year, you know, when I was inexperienced and didn’t have a realistic perspective on parenting.

[A brief pause while I go deflate my crunchier-than-thou attitude... Thank you.]

~~~~~~

I want to make something clear, though: we don’t do cloth diaper because I am just O So Awesome, we do them because it really isn’t that difficult. Believe me, I would not have continued doing it if it weren’t worth it. Sure, they’re a little more work than disposable, but that increased amount of work has not at all outweighed the benefit.

{OBaby’s 1 month old cloth diapered bum}

Now please allow to me to explain said benefit. It won’t be very hard.

We will spend half as much on diapering with gDiapers cloth inserts as we would using disposable diapers, just in the first 18 months.

Another way to state that: supplies for the first 18 months of using these diapers will have paid themselves off by the time OBaby is 9 months old (by the way, that’s this April).

Yes, you heard read correctly. I actually did the math, including everything down to the extra loads of laundry and water usage that these diapers will require, and they STILL will more than pay for themselves in the first year.

{This picture is supposed to be an artsy one of his cloth diaper, but I know that all you are thinking is “O MY KNEE ROLLS.”}

It is not hard to convince me that walking up and down the stairs to my basement about 5 extra times a week is worth that. Plus, didn’t you hear? Doing cloth diapers got me a remodeled laundry room out of the deal.

By the by, have you seen my laundry room lately? I added a little something above the washer and dryer:

And with that, congratulations! You have now survived a riveting post about baby-poo-catching contraptions complete with pictures of a laundry room.

You are so, so welcome.

“Praise Jesus, I finally weigh enough for my Earth-lovin’, cloth diaperin’ mommy to put my little bum in gDiapers! Now if Daddy could just keep up his end of the laundry room deal…”

Both are $30+ items made out of nothing but cotton fabric. Well, organic cotton fabric.

They’re both also all the rage in attachment parenting circles, and if you’re really quiet, you can hear them calling my name.

Hear that?

“Buuuuuuuuuuuuuuy meeeeeeeeeeee Allison!”

And buy them I did. Online with promotion codes and free shipping coupons so I felt better about myself, but I bought them nonetheless.

You see, I set about on this parenting/pregnancy/baby adventure wanting so badly to do it the right way.¬† I didn’t register for one (or seven) of those crazy entertainment sensory bouncers because “babies don’t need all of that jazz and plastic to be happy if they never get used to it”. We’ll do cloth diapers because it will be cheaper, better for our world and baby’s skin, and baby will be potty trained earlier (nothing motivates a little one to keep their bum dry like a lack of modern chemicals that… well… keep their bum dry). We even worked hard to find a biblical name that is not already used in DanO’s family and that isn’t overly popular.

Oh yes, I am doing things the right way, there’s no question about it.

Just, please don’t look any closer.

Because, if you look closer you’ll see that we do in fact have an entertainment bouncer. It’s borrowed from friends and is stored upstairs because I plan on resorting to it when everything from tummy time to calling down the Holy Spirit have failed to calm a hysterical Nugget. Then, on top of that, we paid just a wee bit extra to get our own fancy soothing rocker chair with a wooden frame. How is it different or better? I’m really not sure, but it’s wooden and classy and screams ‘natural mama’, so I sprung for it.

Yes, it is appropriate to stop here and acknowledge my hypocrisy.

Ahem.

Our cloth diapers are the overpriced, high-end kind. No, seriously. They appeal to certain markets, including people who make far more than we do, who live in tiny Manhattan studios with huge Manhattan mortgages, and who are willing to pay top dollar to use the latest earth-friendly, organic product. We are, in fact, none of those things. If I were a little less of a ‘back-to-basics’ phony with a little thicker skin, I would have tried a more simple diapering system with a more reasonable price tag. I guess you could say I was sucked in by all of the Manhattan diapering glamor.

Yea, go ahead and let that one sink in: “Manhattan diapering glamor“.

And as for our not-overly-popular Bible name?

Ironically, we aren’t the only ones these days who like its “lack of popularity”.

So, am I as much of a phony as I feel like I am?

Yes.

ThereIsaidit. In fact, let me say that louder, because I think it’s healthy:

Yes.

That’s really all I’ve got this morning: just a little piece of humble pie to start my day.

Mmm, tasty.

We’re doing cloth diapers. ThereIsaidit.

Maybe it’s to hug a tree (did you know that Christopher Columbus’ diapers would still be sitting in a landfill if he’d used Huggies? Those suckers take more than 500 years to break down), maybe it’s to save a buck (or $800 a year), or maybe it’s so I’m not soaking my baby’s bum in chlorine and chemicals 24 hours a day for the first 2 years of his life, but we’re doing the cloth thing for nugget, for our budget, and for the earth (Whoa there. Me thinkest my Oregonian roots are showing).

We’re not the only couple on this bandwagon, either. Cloth is making such a comeback right now that there are literally dozens of brands of cloth diapers and even more styles/models/features/colors. These are not your mother’s pinned cloth diapers complete with the rubber-pants, either. I have recently familiarized myself with technical vocabulary like pocket diapers, AIOs/All-in-Ones, tri-folds, inserts, liners, and prefolds, Oh my!

After exhaustive research online, in magazines, and with other cloth mommas, we’ve decided on a brand and a type of diaper. I know you’re on the edge of your seat, so without further adieu, I introduce to you the gDiaper:

gDiapers is a Portland, Oregon based company (You would, Allison.) that makes these adorable and, for lack of a better term than the ‘S’ word, sustainable diapers (When did that happen? Now I’m the quintessential pregnant lady and the I-want-to-be-cool-so-I-talk-about-how-green-I-am lady?¬† ::yikes::).¬† I’ll save the non-diaper-enthralled readers the pain of an exhaustive review, but I do want to hit some highlights of why we chose to go with ‘the g’.

The main component is the ‘little G pant’, the cute bum-swaddling green thing in the picture above. Don’t you just want to squeeze them? Then, the gDiaper company sells chlorine-free, plastic-free, biodegradable diaper inserts to catch, well, you know, what diapers catch. These can be thrown away (break down in 150 days) or flushed down the toilet when they’re dirty. An alternative (or in our family, alternate) to the disposable inserts is to use a cloth one, which can be laundered and reused infinitely. Ok, so not literally ? uses, but a lot more than you’ll need. (Unless you’re Octomom, who’s really not just Octomom, but nobody knows the numerical prefix for 14.) Wash and re-use is where the money savings come in. We plan on using cloth when we’re at home or with family and disposable when we’re oot ‘n aboot because they’re just so darn convenient.

So, as giddy as can be, I officially ordered the mother load of diaper supplies last week. By coupling a free shipping promo on the website right now and a 20% off coupon code found in a parenting magazine, I pretty much hit the cloth diaper jackpot. It was like Christmas in March or a Wells Fargo Wagon delivery or the  first time I tried french fries dipped in a Frosty: glorious.

Enjoy it now, Dan-o says, in 6 months you’re going to want to never see a diaper again.

And oh how I’m enjoying it! Look at all those adorable colors! Can you believe Nugget’s bum will be that teeny-tiny? The fabric is so soft! What great design! Have I told you about gDiapers, complete stranger in the baby aisle of Target? ::continues on in praise of gDiapers::

This is where you ask yourself: Has there ever been a woman more excited to use a waste removal system?! I think not.