My First Blog

Over the last several years, blogging has become quite the journalistic “phenomenon” so to speak.  Since its inception, I’ve always wanted to start my own blog. 

I have a lot to say, many, MANY random observations as well as opinions on anything from family to politics to sports.  But I never really thought that anyone would be interested in what I had to say about any of these subjects.  I thought that I had wanted to start a blog about parenting when our daughter was born.  Not necessarily about how to parent, but more along the lines of funny stories or things that I’ve learned along the way.  It’s now been two years since the birth of "Little E" and we are moving into another phase of her life.  I’ve started Tweeting and find it difficult to accurately express myself in 140 characters.  Interesting things are happening.  Not so much things that she is doing, but decisions that we have made in the last few days that have made us rethink some of the things we do.  We are always learning and making new decisions based upon the new information we have come across or that has been brought to our attention.  So here goes nothing!

Recently, through Facebook somehow, my wife found an amazing educator that we now wish we had found two and a half years ago while pregnant with  Little E.  Her name is Shari Criso, and while she doesn’t live anywhere near us, we have already gotten a wealth of information from only two “webisodes” of her show My Baby Experts.  She is a nurse midwife, IBCLC, owner of a boutique in New Jersey, and author of two breastfeeding programs.  The second webisode that we (mostly Mama Bird, as Little E is a night owl and doesn’t go to bed until 9:30 or later) watched focused on cloth diapering.  Cloth diapering was something that we considered when the time was drawing near for Little E to be born, but we took the road more travelled instead and chose to go with disposables.  We mostly weren’t picky, buying whatever we had a coupon for, switching things up as we went along.  Then we started noticing that she was getting rashes with a certain brand, so we stopped using them.  We didn’t have any issues for a long time, until recently, when we tried a store brand for the first time.  Little E seems to have come down with a yeast infection.  We haven’t been to the doctor as of this writing, but all descriptions found on the internet seem to confirm this home diagnosis.  This has all led to the following decision: we’re going cloth.  That’s right, cloth diapers.  The decision we should have made over two years ago.  Did you know that disposable diapers contain trace amounts of Dioxin?  This is a carcinogenic chemical KNOWN by the EPA to be one of the most toxic cancer-causing chemicals.  And we put it right against our babies’ genitals!  What is wrong with us?  Now, I know, maybe I’m over-reacting to “trace amounts”, but that isn’t the only toxic chemical found in disposable diapers.  For more information about these chemicals go to http://www.realdiaperassociation.org/diaperfacts.php.  Also consider this, you will spend between $4,000 and $6,000 on disposable diapers before you child is potty trained.  This is an astronomical number that we never even considered when thinking about how to diaper our daughter.  We also reduce our Carbon Footprint when we choose cloth over disposable.  And now there are even more options.  gDiapers now makes a Hybrid diaper system that is biodegradable and can be either washed, flushed, or thrown out.  This system actually breaks down in 60 days while a standard disposable remains unchanged during this time period.  Watch a short video with pictures here http://www.gdiapers.com/happy-planet/watch-them-break-down.

Now I’m not saying your evil if you go with disposables.  We did it for two years.  But with this new information in hand, we’ve made a decision to better ourselves and make a new commitment to our environment.  Each person and family has their own opinion on which is the best way to go.  I always leaned more towards disposables.  They were more convenient, fold them up and throw them away.  But, with our new found knowledge, we’ll be cloth diaperers (Is that a word?) from here on out.

So this is why I have decided to start a blog: after frantically running around West York last night, hoping against hope that we would be able to find some of the new cloth pocket diapers, we decided to just bite the bullet and go with some pre folds until we could order the pocket ones off the internet.  Quick note: Did you know that both Target AND Babies R Us carry pre fold diapers, BUT NO DIAPER PINS!  How are you supposed to close the diaper without pins?  I never thought I’d say this, but thank God for Wal Mart!  That’s right, in a last ditch effort to find a solution for a few days, we went to Wal Mart in hopes of finding just two diaper pins.  And then, once they were washed and dried (finished around 9:30), there was the task of trying to fit the diaper on  Little E.  I made it as tight as I could, which was still rather loose around the legs, followed that up with a pair of training pants, and a plastic diaper cover in hopes of keeping everything dry in  Little E’s bed.  Well, the report is that the bed somehow managed to stay dry, but nothing else.  So tonight  Little E is wearing a pair of training pants under a disposable diaper so that her skin doesn’t come in contact with that actual diaper.  The new gDiapers will be here tomorrow and a new era will begin in our family.