Nobody does it better...

Having covered inputs, I guess the next post should be about outputs. And here Holly really is miles (of diapers) above the rest. In terms of containment, we planned to do cloth diapers and my mom was wonderful enough to pay for a cloth diaper service for 12 weeks. The woman came and taught us how to use them and dropped off the goods (diaper covers, a snappy, a storage bin, etc). We've used them for 11 weeks now and I'm sad to say that we're planning to stop using them soon. There are several reasons for this.

1. Disposables at night. Holly is "sleeping through the night" now (see earlier post on sleeping) and if I change her in the middle of the night I wake her up. But if I don't then she's soaking wet all night which is bad for her (as well as her pj's and our sheets). So we started putting her in a disposable at night.

2. Disposables during the day. Transporting cloth diapers back and forth from the nannies was going to suck. So we put her in disposables for that period of time too.

3. Cost. It's $120/month for 85 cloth diapers a week. 40 disposables is about $10 (depending on the brand you get it's more or less). My nanny said it best, "Everything is so expensive and I had to make a choice whether I paid more for the food we ate or the diapers we used. I think that organic produce is better for them than organic diapers."

4. What's greener? I was feeling some pretty terrible green guilt about sending that many disposables to a landfill, until I did some reading online. If you look at the water use, energy use, transportation for the service, etc... the effects on the Earth aren't that much better. My service doesn't use bleach, but she can't air dry that many diapers each week and said she frequently has to wash them twice to get them clean. I was going to get the biodegradable kinds but then I read that they only biodegrade if they don't go to a landfill and mine would. I've read up on the G diapers (which can be flushed) and they're all well and good except that the city sanitation service isn't loving this one. The reality is that unless you potty train your infant, there's no really good green option. Washing and air drying them yourself is the best of the lot, but even that is not negligible.

5. Quantity and frequency. Holly's had it all. She's a super pooper. We had to call the diaper service and ask her to bring MORE than the usual 85 a week. She's replaced frequency with quantity now and the cloth can't handle it, the diaper covers can't handle it and we're finding that 7th Generation brand disposables can't handle it. I will keep trying the more eco-friendly brands for a while before finally giving up and hitting up the big names (Pampers, Huggies, etc) which word on the street is are the only ones that can take the blow outs. For now, we're doing a lot of laundry (which would be easier if our washer wasn't breaking...friggin Sears).

6. Mobility. Holly's really hitting milestone after milestone these days except for one- rolling over. We've found that the cloth diapers and diaper covers are very bulky and inhibit her ability to roll around. But she has no trouble rolling around when she's naked or in a disposable- something that nearly resulted in a disaster on the changing table earlier this week. It also limits what pants we can put her in, but that's not as much of a concern.

I'm glad we did the service for 12 weeks. For one thing that's a lot less disposables that were sent to a landfill, since she went through 100 diapers a week for 6 weeks. I also feel like that disposables have some odd chemicals in them and avoiding them during her first 12 weeks was good. Plus, it was worth a shot.