Why cloth diapers are a deal with the devil.

It's been a blustery winter day.  Jamie and Charlie are doing a lot better with the regiment of antibiotics and breathing treatments pumping through their bodies, but they were cranky, cranky, cranky.

My children have lost all their negotiation skills.   Months of having their aunts and uncles wait on them hand and foot, and now that they're left to their own devices it's dog eat dog.  Seriously, they're like wolf cubs, tumbling all over each other.  There was even some biting today (a heinous crime that hasn't reared its ugly head around here in some time).   This afternoon they were building a mega train city, and I finally had to divide the tracks evenly, and have them build two separate tracks.  Of course, then they wanted to go back and forth between each other's cities, so we had to build a connection between the two.  Commerce proceeded fine from then on, until the bigger brother started coming over whenever he wanted to, so they had to implement a fence and border with permission protocol to come across. Go figure.  This is why politics are always the same...whether you're children or giant countries. 

Robbie woke up from his nap in such a state of adorableness, I couldn't help but cover him in kisses and take his seven month picture.  His nursery makes me happy every time I go in it.  It's like a peaceful haven in my otherwise crazy house.  I also love seeing all my soft, fluffy, beautiful cloth diapers folded and ready to go in the changing table.   A changing table!  I feel so spoiled to have one after changing the diapers of five siblings and two children without one.

I wish I didn't like cloth diapers...I really do.  I feel like a smoker who thought they could stop any time, but can't.   I started cloth diapering thinking, "oh, I'll just try this for awhile and see what I think."  The problem is, they suck you in.  The first six months of a baby's life, it is so simple to do cloth diapers.  Babies are exclusively breastfed in the beginning, and their poop and pee is practically the same thing except the color.  You just throw those bad boys straight in the washer, with some special detergent and a little disinfecting tea tree oil and it's all good.   Really, it's that easy.   And then the horrid day comes when they eat their first peach, or pear or whatever, and it's all over.  You lay your bouncing, happy baby on the changing table, open their diaper, and things are never the same again.    You can't just dump them in the washer anymore.   Things like "toilet dunking" and "liners" and "diaper sprayers" start to enter your vocabulary.  It's awful.   I tell Jim "I'm switching to disposables!", but then I find myself standing in the disposable diaper aisle thinking...

1. The stench.  The smell of disposable diapers is awful after you've been cloth diapering for awhile.  Sure cloth diapers smell bad too after your baby has used them, but they smell like poop and pee.  Not poop and pee mixed with a spray paint factory.  
2. The crunchy plastic.   When your baby's bottom has been gently swathed in bamboo velour and the like, it feels plain wrong to slap industrialized plastic/paper/gel on their private parts. 
3. They're ugly.  It's hard to buy what essentially looks like paper towels and put them on your baby, when you have a huge assortment of brightly colored, and cute printed diapers waiting to be used at home. 
4. The cost.  This is really the clencher.   I always forget how expensive disposable diapers are until I come face to face with the cost, and am horrified.   Besides, it doesn't really matter how cheap the disposables are...they can't beat free.  

Free, soft, natural, beautiful diapers waiting for me at home, and I wonder what possessed me to walk down the disposable diaper aisle in the first place.  So I go home, and look at the giant pile of poopy diapers that have to be...dealt with.  And I want to turn around and run straight back to walmart for disposables.

That's how I find myself rinsing off poopy diapers outside, in the dark, and it's freezing.   I think I've certifiably lost my mind... until I see this nice beautiful stack of diapers and think.  Ah, I love cloth diapers!  Gah...It's a deal with the devil.