6.23.11: Cloth diapers

I'm really glad that I'm pregnant and can blame my mood on hormones. This has been a depressing week for me. I have felt like a such a failure. And I am not a failure. But I was failing. I've spent a lot of time examining myself and giving myself pep talks and reminders of why I am not a failure.

The cause of this depression: cloth diapers.

Last week I was so excited to start on this new adventure. I'd done super gross cloth diapers at an orphanage in Ecuador where I once changed 20 diapers in 20 minutes. I was sure I could do the more advanced, expensive, and yuppie class pseudo cloth diapers. But then this week, things went down hill.

First, I noticed that my diapers continued to smell like urine even after being washed and left in the sun for hours. I tried more detergent; I tried soaking them in vinegar; I tried hotter water and they still smelt like pee--I was getting ready to go get a display board and enter this year's fifth grade science fair. Except that none of my hypothesis were working out.

Add to that, Rex was leaking all over the place. On Wednesday alone, he went through 3 pairs of shorts before I ran out of cloth diapers and had to put him back in disposables.

My back porch has looked like this all week. I was washing every day and still not making it through day without using a disposable.

Then I talked to my friend Amy, the great cloth diaper sage, and found out that I was doing it wrong, but right. She said that she often has to wash her diapers twice before the pee smell comes out. That made me feel a bit better. Then she said that I shouldn't be washing my plastic liners in hot water because they aren't really plastic and the hot water ruins the water proofing. So then I felt dumb. But then she told me she went through the fifth-grade science fair project when she first started cloth diapering too, so then I didn't feel so bad again. She gave me a box of new liners and I was on my way.

Then Rex peed straight through his diaper like he was naked.

Needless to say I was discouraged.

I was obviously a failure as a mother because I couldn't even diaper my kid successfully. I've put a lot of money into these money-saving diapers, so I had to keep trying. But I wasn't sure how long I could last with washing every day and going through three or four outfits a day. I was failing. So I did what anyone would do. I took naps. A lot of them. And long ones.

And then today, not a single leak. Not even the poopy diaper. I don't know what happened, but I do know that I didn't take a nap and I reset our budget for July and did a few other rather unpleasant things because I was no longer a failure.

When I started this cloth diapering adventure, I had no idea it would take such as toll on my self-efficacy as a mother. Let's hope we continue to be leak free tomorrow, or we might have some serious problems.