Disposables Uncovered: They are garbage!

Please feel free to laugh at my expense :


Sometimes, my own tiredness (or lazyness) overwhelms me and I fail to do things that I know I should. Last Friday was one of those times. I usually wash Chlo's diapers ritually every three days. I hardly ever miss a wash day. I don't have enough diapers to go longer than that really, and even if I did......I'm afraid of what the house would smell like. Yuck? But last Friday I came home from work and I was so tired from the week and so happy to have Scott home for a night of relaxing, that......I got lazy and didn't do it.

Now, I'm not going to sit here all high and mighty and act like we've never used a disposable. We have, on occasion. Little miss has a sensitive bum, and she gets diaper rashes really easily. We tried disposables a time or two to see if it helped clear the rash up. Guess what.....it didn't. We used disposables for times that we wanted to try diaper creams to help with rashes, and didn't want to ruin our cloth diapers. But, creams don't help much either. So, we rarely use disposables and don't know much about them. And I'm happy about that. On with the story......

By the way, if you don't like reading about poop, then you might as well click your back button right now and save yourself. This story is full of it. Literally.


Friday night, after being lazy and trading in shlepping diapers to and fro for relaxing on my couch and watching movies with the fam, I put the last clean prefold on Chloe's bum for bedtime. We all went to bed peacefully and happy (ok, that's an exaggeration, Chloe screamed her teething head of for an hour first, and we all went to bed stressed and grumpy). Saturday morning rolled around, and we all got up and started figuring out our standing plans to go to Del Osso Farms for the day. Meanwhile, I had no clean diapers left. My choices were to drag diapers over to the laundry room, pray for an open machine, and spend the next three hours doing what I should have done the night before, OR say forget it and use the disposables we happen to have on hand. I took the path of least resistance and decided on disposables. I'm still kicking myself for this!

Saturday morning proceeded like usual, feeding Chloe her yummy breakfast of home made baby food (pears and oatmeal). Did you catch that? Pears? Pears. It's a glorious food for helping a baby keep things moving. I give her pears just about every other day to ward off any constipation that she may have from the various foods (and formula) she eats. It's worked wonders. So many wonders.......*sigh*

After her pear meal, and a little bit of play time, I tried to finish feeding her the formula she still had left. She started eating, but began to squirm a bit......then suddenly freaked out. And I thought, what the heck!? But chalked it up to teething. Until my nose informed me otherwise......

I took her in to change her, and as I was taking the disposable diaper off, I noticed something odd. No poop? As I unwrapped the diaper, I didn't see any poop at first glance and there was NO WAY that smell could have just been gas. As I began to lift her bum, I started to get a clearer picture of the mysterious vanishing poop. There was poop alright............but not in the diaper. It had traveled backwards and outwards. There was poop on her onesie. Yuck! But I wasn't phased by this.........we've had minor blow outs in cloth. But the odd thing was, the blow outs usually happen at the leg in our cloth diapers, never up the back. As I began to pull away the diaper I thought, sheesh that's not much poop, I hope it isn't going to be one of "those" days. The kind of day where your kid poops 800 times in a row instead of one or two larger poops. But as I started to peel off her onesie, I realized there was more poop. A lot more poop. The poo had traveled COMPLETELY up her back, all the way up to her NECK!!! It was even in her hair!! How in the WORLD did this happen?!?!?!?!?!?!?!? I was actually horrified. I was holding her out as far away from me as possible, completely disgusted and in shock! I yelled for Scott, and I have no idea why. What was he supposed to do? Get a hose? Call the hazmat crew? I was stunned. This was the most disgusting blow out that has ever happened to us. Ever. To top it off, when Scott walked in the room to see his naked child covered in poop from head to toe, she laughed! She actualy giggled when he walked in the room. She was pretty proud of herself!! Scott didn't even have words.....it took him a minute or two to understand what he was looking at. It took us both several minutes to decide how to clean her up without getting poop all over the house. The thought actually crossed my mind to take a picture of this event because it was so horrifying! Don't worry though readers. I will spare you the gag reflex. I didn't turn this into a kodak moment, and even if I had, I wouldn't subject you to images of that toxic spill.

This was a major lesson to us both. Being lazy does NOT pay off when it comes to diapers. As I mentioned before, we don't have much experience with disposables, so I don't know why it happened or if that's a common problem. And honestly, I don't care to know! I have never had that massive of a problem with my cloth diapers, I am a master of the jelly-roll fold my friends! OI can honestly say I would much rather swish a million pooped on diapers in the toilet than clean up the aftermath of a disposable. At least the poop stays where it belongs (mostly) in our cloth dipes!

Bonus section:
I decided to do a little math on weather or not cloth diapers have saved us any money, just out of curiosity. To date, I have spent $375 bucks on cloth diapers. That includes the two months I paid for diaper service. My stash consists of 12 DiaperRite prefolds, 6 various covers, and 17 various "modern" cloth diapers. And I also included the laundry detergents. Yep, 375 bucks for 6 *almost* 7 months of diapering. What would I have spent on sposies? Well lets see.....if I were to use disposables full time I would strictly use chemical free (cuz I'm a damned hippie freak) and I would have to go with Tushies I think. Not even Seventh Generation is chemical free.
So with Tushies, here's what I figured, keep in mind Chloe is 206 days old today:
12 diapers/day for 30 days = 360 diapers = $99.29
8 diapers/day for 176 days = 1408 diapers = $511.93
Rough total for Chem free = $611.22 not including tax and shipping.

Standard national brand:
12 diapers/day for 30 days = 360 diapers = $119.96
8 diapers/day for 176 days = 1408 diapers = $327.92
Rough total for standard diapers $447.88

If my math is wrong please let me know. I actually probably underestimated on the number of daily changes after newborn. We did 12 diapers a day for about a month and then 10 a day for about another two months and then 8 a day. And of course, there's fluctuations. I would guess those numbers are undershot. And they don't include any tax. Or account for coupons you may or may not have. But I'm guessing it's a good average. So there you have it. Our diapers have already paid for themselves, and are now saving us money. Cloth diapers for the wallet win!!

And holy crap, have we really changed 1,768+ diapers?! good grief!

Because of my lazy laundry lapse, I am going to giveaway a laundry sampler kit to a lucky reader!