Oooh that smell

Back when the Ninja was nearing the end of the gestational assembly line, Kitty determined that we were going to minimize our contributions to the local landfill and somehow she convinced me that cloth diapers were a great idea. Something about wanting the house to constantly smell like a Honey Bucket at a Phish concert. I don't know. I wasn't really listening.

Whatever it was, being a good little hippie with poor listening skills, I stupidly agreed and we signed up for a weekly diaper service. We went with the service since I wasn't about to throw dirty diapers into the washing machine with my clothes. Obviously, this is back before I became so intimately acquainted with bodily fluids & excretions. Back when the idea of getting peed or thrown up on terrified me.

In retrospect, my worries probably led us down the wrong path. Instead of being able to quickly launder any stinky diapers, we were stuck with them in our house 24/7 - an ever growing pile of poopy rags. I'd have preferred Finn to just poop directly into the dirty clothes hamper, where we could immediately clean it up, than to have to stick the diapers into a pail that wouldn't get picked up until Friday.

We stuck with it for 16-months, but as of a couple of weeks ago, we are now back on disposables 100%. I thought I'd be thrilled, but now the disposables are nagging at me. Every time one breaks when I try to put it on, or when Finn decides to poop five minutes after I change his diaper, I feel like I'm throwing away my beer money with each wasted diaper. At least with the cloth diapers, I could use as many as I wanted and the price didn't change. In addition to soaking up all sorts of smelly stuff, they were also great for dusting the house and polishing the car. And the big bags they were delivered in made great beanbag seating for guests, as you can see from the pic above.

We need to get this kid potty trained before I stoop to rinsing the disposables out and re-using them. He flushed the toilet for the first time the other day, so he's halfway there. Unfortunately, that's not the important half. Jena's got him napping without a binky, which is more than we've accomplished, so maybe I just need to sit back and do nothing until she gets him potty-trained too.

That approach has served me well in my career, so I don't see why it wouldn't apply here as well.

Get to work, Jena.