Still, we'd heard all sorts of things about cloth diapers, few of them good: the constant washing, regular changing, storage issues... disposables were, and are, far more convenient. Use once, throw away. Repeat until college.
Courtesy of an online community called Diaper Swappers, however, my wife found a whole stack of bargains on secondhand cloth diapers. After persuading me to try them, she made several purchases, all of which came through as promised and all of which arrived fresh and clean. They turned out to be a lot more sophisticated than I thought. After all, they're cloth diapers. How fancy can they get? They're just absorbent giftwrapping for the presents baby leaves for mom and dad, right?
It was here that I learned a fundamental truth about marketing anything to parents: nothing is too fancy.
First, disposable inserts are an option, which makes life a lot easier. Slip one in between the skin and the diaper and you've got a piece of what feels like smooth, heavy paper to catch the solid waste, aka "poop," while the rest of diaper would catch the urine.
Second, the diapers have a separate breathable poly-vinyl outer skin called "Thirsties" that goes over the outside of the cloth diaper. Once the whole package is on baby's bottom, it looks like a thick swimming diaper. You can even color-coordinate the Thirsties.
In other words, it wasn't nearly as primitive as I thought it would be. In fact, it was kind of fun. But what really cracked me up were the names of some of the cloth diaper brands. Bummis. Fuzzi Buns. And my favorite: bumGenius. These names rank right up there with Boudreaux's Butt Paste.
I guess if it isn't cute, you can't market it to the parents of babies.
Anyway, my wife put together a spreadsheet/chart/graph presentation worthy of a White House briefing that showed that even with the purchase of a brand-new washing machine, we'd still spend more in a year buying disposables instead of using cloth. Plus we can keep the diapers on hand if - when - we have a second child. We went ahead and bought the washing machine so my wife wouldn't have to pack up our daughter on daily trips to the apartment laudromat with a bagful of dirty diapers.
So far, the laundry hasn't defeated my wife. My day-long in-service training regimen finally ends tomorrow - and you thought teachers had summers off. Ha! - so I'll be able to start helping with that. I'm the primary cook now, which free my sweetie up to care for the baby and stay ahead of the other household chores. She's even managing to get something approximating enough sleep. So far, so good.
All in all, I'd say that the cloth diapers were certainly worth it. Tedious, yes, but not nearly as much as I'd feared. Plus we keep a stock of disposables on hand, just in case. We haven't needed them yet but with only two days worth of cloth diapers in steady rotation, you never know.
In fact, I have only one major complaint: the diapers don't wash themselves.
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