It's Not That Easy Being Green

I've made the plunge, I've done it. I've gone and lost my mind and bought cloth diapers. It's been a hard decision for me. My little sister Mary, who's pregnant with her first, decided to do cloth diapers, and did a lot of research and preparation. She's talked to me for months about this, and her enthusiasm and dedication to the subject sparked me thinking about it. Back before we knew where we would live, I said that if we moved somewhere that we had our own washer and dryer, I would probably do it then. That sentence had enough clauses in it that I didn't really worry about the actualities of what it means to do cloth diapers. Now we have a place lined up - with the miraculous W&D connections. And in a couple of weeks, we're going to buy some nice used ones to place there, and voila, we have an automatic laundry doer-machiney-thing.

And my previous carefree statement began sticking in my throat. Because now I had to face the actual reality of cloth diapers or no.

No longer would it be the careless, free spirited chucking the dirty diaper into a trash can and carelessly taking it to the dumpster. No, it would be the careful dunk into the toilet to rinse out, then place into a forbidden zone of a pail until I had enough to wash and dry and then fold and put away and repeat ad nauseum.

Thinking of all of this, my might chose disposable diapers.

But, cloth diapers are cheaper in the long run, even with the extra laundry.

My mind chose cloth diapers.

My time is worth something, and it's more of a bother to do cloth diapers and I've never changed a cloth diaper in my life and honestly? I'm scared of them and I can't do this, and did I mention I have a fear of toilets? How could I knowingly dunk cloth into it and still use it again later?

My heart chose disposable diapers.

Did you know that every child that uses disposable diapers adds one ton of waste to a landfill? And that these same diapers will still be decomposing a few hundred years after my precious baby has herself already returned to the Earth and completely decomposed? Although cloth diapers do use water and electricity to clean, these are more renewable resources than landfills. I am a steward over this Earth, and have to be accountable for how I treated it, and so....

My strength (also known as my social conscience) chose once and for all cloth diapers.

I never knew that being green ran so deep in my veins. I think I still don't know, exactly, what happened. It's not that I think I was being completely wasteful as a person by using disposable diapers, but more that I knew I could be doing more, and that it was only my selfish desires and fears keeping me from doing so.

Even with this decision made inside, I still wavered on the outside. I talked to Aleatha about cloth diapers, since her mom had a baby three years ago, and they used cloth diapers on her, just like they had done for all previous of their six children. Aleatha told me that she had always planned to do cloth diapers, and since she had never known anything else, she didn't have to make a jump from the seeming ease of disposable diapers. Aleatha pointed out that I would just have to do it, that I wouldn't be comfortable in using cloth diapers until I used them (at least, this is what I got out of what she told me. Her actual words may have been quite different indeed.)

So, I made the jump. Last week while we were out, I bought cloth diapers. Partly what I had hemmed and hawed about before is that there are so many kinds of cloth diapers out there, and I didn't know what I wanted, and more importantly, what I could afford. Some are just like disposable diapers - preformed and everything, while others are the kind that covered your and my little baby bottoms - the basic "pre fold" that's basically just an absorbent cloth you fold yourself. I wanted the fanciest kind for convenience, and because they're slimmer, but then I realized that the basic ones were six times cheaper overall, and so I bought the good old kind.

I still need to buy the plastic "pants" online, since they didn't have them in the Walmart I was at, and then I'm officially ready to go. I'm kind of excited. I feel like I need to put flowers in my hair, and, I don't know, go to a sit-in or something. Because I think I might be a hippie. Or a granola. After all, I nurse, have natural births, like attachment parenting, sleep with my baby, and now I'm going to cloth diapers as well.

After all, as Kermit says, "I am green and it'll do fine, It's beautiful! And I think it's what I want to be."

P.S. If you don't use cloth diapers, do not think I am condemning you. After all, this was a very difficult decision to come to myself, and I completely understand using disposable diapers.