Our family has been cloth diapering for over four years and I frequently get questions from friends who are considering it. When we were in the consideration stage, the available resources seemed to be from someone wanting to sell me a product (“Every brand and style we stock is THE BEST option!!”), from friends who were already successfully diapering (“It’s so easy! Here, take this little recycled jam jar of my favorite soap!”) and didn’t remember how hard it had been to start, or, God forbid, as posts on message boards with more unintelligible acronyms than the United States Navy. (“I am FTM WAHM DD is 18 mo c/s but ICYWTK p&p soaked right through the AIOs LMAO!!! – MommieNugget934”) There are many excellent reasons to cloth diaper but I notice that a lot of people compile a few tools, aren’t sure what else they need, and end up derailed because they didn’t understand how to fit cloth diapering in the rhythm of their life. This is understandable – bringing a new child home whether as a birth parent or through adoption – causes all kinds of disruption to your routine, whether you had zero children or several.
There are great reasons to cloth diaper – significantly minimizing your landfill waste, having much less trash to set out each week (and it will certainly smell better), saving a whole lot of money on diapers, keeping a lot of really intense chemicals with questionable safety standards away from your kid’s bum – but I’m not going to get into the research or arguments for it in this post. What’s coming up is: some Exposition about our family so you know a little more about our mindset and our resources. Then, Tools and Technicalities – exactly what we bought, what we made or scrapped together, helpful repurposed items you can find around the house. Space and Rhythm will cover exactly how and when we launder cloth diapers, making this chore fit physically into our home and mentally into our schedules.
Know from the beginning you will find yourself intimately acquainted with your child’s poop. If bodily substances gross you out and make you doubt your ability to cloth diaper, keep in mind that parenting in general is great exposure therapy. Did Junior actually eat that green foam giraffe sticker off of his brother’s t-shirt? Yes he did, and here it is the next day, peeking out from behind a half digested raisin. No harm no foul. You can totally do this.
EXPOSITION
I was very pregnant when I was trying to figure out cloth diapering in time to register for items our baby shower, which was only a month before Junior was born. I struggle generally with decision making even when my body isn’t allocating its resources to the growth of another human being, so it was exhausting. Thankfully we had two families in our orbit whose bits of advice and brand recommendations were similar, so we opted to stick with one vendor and one or two brands and never look back. I detest shopping in all its ways – online, in store, driving around looking for that elusive Craigslist address – so I want one thing that works fine and I don’t want to think about it again. I’m also really committed to waiting for something to come along used rather than just buying a new thing, but diapering has at times required me to just make a snap money-spending decision and be fine with it. Like the time I was nursing my five week old in bed and realized he had managed to fill both his diaper and my pajama shorts and MY OWN underwear with poop. And I was just sitting in my bed holding poop, in a big smear of poop, and I didn’t know how to move to get out of the situation and also I had no more clean pants or nursing shirts in the house. If you think that sound terrible, it is, but it could have happened to anyone, regardless of diapering choice. I recount it only to illustrate that life with babies is totally insane and a key part of parenting is realizing that there will be plenty of times that you have absolutely no idea what to do. And you will just do something and it will be fine, which is why I cannot remember what it is that I actually did to clean up the baby, the bed, and the mom, only that I am sure I was the last one to get clean and dry. And I probably cried, but now I can laugh about it.
Back to the royal “we”: we are a hetero two parent middle class family with two boys, currently 4 years old and 15 months old. We did not know the gender of either baby before their births. We lived in a one-bedroom apartment when Junior arrived. The basement had a washer we owned and a dryer we shared with the upstairs tenant. We moved into two story single family home with a basement washer and dryer a few months before Junior Jr arrived. In our family my husband and I are generally and equally committed to generating as little landfill-type waste as possible – I think this is really crucial. Most families will likely have one parent who is most involved with diaper maintenance but if your partner doesn’t care about the environment, doesn’t spend enough time at home, or doesn’t think the effort is worth the value, be aware of that before you take on the lion’s share.
Both of our boys were endlessly breastfed, Junior fully weaning himself around 22 months and JrJr still going VERY STRONG despite my efforts to stuff him with fine cheeses. Both parents worked when Junior arrived, and we traded off nights and days with him until, thankfully, grandparents moved to town and took over some of the childcare. Neither child has gone to daycare or had a long-term babysitter other than family – if you’re cloth diapering, it’s important to recognize that you are most likely asking your caregiver to embrace a paradigm shift when it comes to diapers and bodily waste. Some may be willing – it’s not difficult to learn – but some may not want to deal with the perceived hassle of a system that is unlike most people’s. You can always do half and half – we have foster parent friends who do cloth at home, but know it’s not worth sending the kid to visitations in anything other than disposables. We also had cloth-committed friends who decided early on that they were always going to use a disposable at night. There are many ways to diaper! Don’t let anybody judge what works for your family.
If you are familiar with breast fed baby poop, you already know that it’s a strange alien substance: yellow-ish, can be seedy like whole grain mustard, doesn’t really have much of a smell, and is sometimes like a thin slightly mucusy scrambled egg. I am not too familiar with formula poop, but I know it is brownish, a lot more pasty, and tends to be a little less frequent – JrJr is eating solids and nursing a lot, and still pooping three to four times a day. I cook everything we eat, so when it came time to start solids we used Baby Led Weaning, which is just a fancy way of saying we fed our boys appropriately sized real food, letting them experiment with shapes and textures and types of predominantly non-sweet not-cereal not-baby-food foods. Cloth diapering makes you more familiar with your kid’s poop, which I think can be a good way to see how their digestive system is working. And can remind you to be a better parent, like that time you weren’t paying attention and JrJr ate a meal of surely a half cup of blueberries and nothing else. A half-cup sized pure blueberry poop looks as you’d expect; congrats to the many blueberries that made it through the digestive tract completely unaltered.
Junior potty trained fairly early, which I think was a saving grace for me, because he sure didn’t sleep through the night for YEARS. Cloth diapers feel much more wet for the child than disposables, so as he grew he began to know what it was like to have a soggy bottom. Around 18 or 19 months of age, the weather was warm enough for him to go pantsless during much of his day and my wonderful mother would follow him around the yard (yes, a one-bedroom apartment with a yard – only in Pittsburgh!) with a green IKEA potty and swoop it between his legs when he would start to tinkle. She would then take great delight in putting a sticker and description on his completely unlinear potty chart, and he would take no notice whatsoever of this celebration. But it was a great way to begin and by two years old we were in a solid potty routine. I don’t remember when he started wearing big boy underpants during the day but by the time we moved out of the apartment, which was at his two year five months mark, he was only being diapered at night. Lest you think he must be some kind of placid, compliant, highly suggestible child: um, he’s not. For both children, we stopped changing diapers during the night around the two or three month mark. JrJr wears an enormous extra absorbent nighttime diaper so large he walks with a bowlegged Wild West cowboy strut.
So, now that you know a bit about our family and our resources, here’s what we use to diaper.
TOOLS & TECHNICALITIES
I’m only going to describe what we actually purchased, whether it worked, and how we do things. The internet is full of all the other options!
Hospital Disposables: What?! Yes, that’s right, though we tenderly packed newborn cloth diapers into our hospital and birth center suitcases, the nurses loaded us up with half a dozen disposables, which we used until both Juniors passed their meconium. Meconium is baby’s first stool, odorless and sterile, before any food has been digested. It’s a black tarry substance and is typically finished being excreted around 48 hours after birth – it then transitions to green and finally yellow stool. Junior passed meconium in the hospital, where we stayed for two nights, but his brother came home from the midwife birthing center only 10 hours after he was born. As a first time parent doing wet and poopy diaper counts for the first few days, which you are required to do to make sure your baby is working right, it was awfully hard to tell if a disposable had been wet into or not. We actually had the hospital’s breastfeeding nurse tear the liner off of several disposable diapers to make sure the absorbent chemicals were actually wet inside. So for JrJr, who had fewer trained professionals managing his care, I was glad to do diaper counts in cloth, because you could tell immediately if they were wet or not.
VERDICT: If this is your first kid, don’t bother taking cloth diapers to the hospital with you. You’ve got too many things to think about, like: “They’re going to let me go HOME with this thing?!” If you’ve had a baby before and/or you’re going for a more casual birth center birth, sure why not.
Newborn All-In-Ones: We purchased 8 newborn all-in-ones used from a friend. Junior was born in a hospital at 39 weeks and weighed 5 lb 12 oz, so he was pretty scrawny. Even at that weight, the newborn all-in-ones didn’t last us more than a few weeks before he grew out of them. I do not suggest them, unless you have lots of money to buy three dozen. Eight total diapers would last us a day, and then we had to wash again. It wasn’t worth it. JrJr was born just before his due date and weighed 7 lb 2 oz. It became evident that he was going to be significantly larger baby than his brother. He gained a pound a week for quite a while, tore through the newborn all-in-ones in about a week and then just kept regularly sizing up from there.
VERDICT: Newborn All-In-Ones were not worth it. Keep reading for what was.
Newborn Snap Covers and Inserts: We registered for three Blueberry brand snap covers in newborn size, and three dozen organic cotton prefolds, newborn size, to go inside of them. A snap cover has fabric on the outside, generally cute and colorful, and a wipe-clean PUL plastic lining on the inside. Prefolds are squares of absorbent fabric, usually cotton, that you fold into thirds along obvious lines, and stick inside the snap cover. I take great offense to the term “pre-fold” because they are not remotely pre-folded, they are flat squares and YOU have to fold them and any baby older than a few weeks can easily kick them into an unfolded state with very little effort. But anyway… When a baby wets the prefold with urine, you can typically just toss it in your gross bucket (explained later) and stick a fresh dry prefold into the same snap cover. When a baby soaks the prefold, the elastic edges of the cover are likely going to be wet – you can just hang it to dry for another use. When a baby poops, it will usually get squished into the elastic edges of the cover, and there are several ways you can deal with that (also explained later.)
Snap covers are great because they are incredibly versatile in terms of size. You can snap them really tight around the waist for your shrimpy 6 pound baby, or you can use them for your potbellied two year old. You can also adjust the rise with snaps, so if your kid is tiny you can shorten the crotch but if he’s long in the torso you might not have the rise snapped up at all. You can double up on prefolds for a more absorbent and hilariously enormous nighttime diaper and simply adjust the snaps to accommodate. We were handed down a few velcro diapers, but already the velcro was wearing out and I could just imagine our active boys ripping them off in frustration, so I categorically do not suggest velcro. We’re on year four of heavy usage for many of our Flip (explained next paragraph) covers and I am only just starting to notice some wear on the elastic where the snap tabs take the most abuse. We’ve never had a snap break and none of our elastics sag – we are also careful to not put covers in the dryer where heat can speed up their wear.
VERDICT: We did not use the Blueberry brand newborn covers more than a month or two but they were helpful because our first baby was so tiny. I think he would have been swimming in a one-size-fits-all for the first few months. Since baby size is not something you can control, I would suggest newborn snap covers, and if you have the cash, I would go with five or six. We washed covers very frequently – in hindsight, I would have loved having a few more. Three dozen prefolds in XS size was a good number but if someone else is buying, ask for a fourth dozen – they’re great as burp cloths too.
One-Size-Fits-All Snap Covers and Inserts: We also received six one-size-fits-all snap covers which fit our kids from very young (2 months) to 4 years old and still going at night. That’s a lot of mileage for a $15 diaper cover! With these, we received or purchased or added to our collection along the way: two dozen small prefolds, four dozen medium prefolds, three more Flip covers, and eventually, two dozen large prefolds. At the moment, our enormous 15 month old is in the large prefolds in Flip covers and our four year old wears a medium or large prefold in the same Flip covers. So at night we have two kids of very different ages and sizes in the same diapers. Pretty efficient. You will know it’s time to size up your prefolds, or readjust your snap configuration, or both, when your baby constantly springs leaks. I was always surprised how much more absorbent the next size up prefold actually was, so I think I should have sized both boys up a little faster. My brain was pretty fried.
VERDICT: BumGenius/Flip brand snap covers (made to fit babies 7-28 pounds), and ClothEez bran prefolds (XS-L options) from Green Mountain Diapers are hands down the foundation of our family’s diapering life. When the prefolds begin to disintegrate, use them for as long as they’re helpful; once they start to dissolve into nothing they can be turned into dust rags, composted, or fed to your worm bin’s residents. Junior was in the medium size prefolds for the bulk of his diapering experience, so that size did not last very far into JrJr’s diapering experience, also because JrJr was a bigger baby he sized up to them quickly and used them longer on the front end. I bought some medium prefolds used on eBay that fell apart rather quickly. Not sure if it was our new home’s washing machine (which was also shredding clothing – the Hubs eventually dismantled and repaired the churning stick thing and that seemed to stop the holes) or if we were just using the heck out of them. But I took comfort knowing they were not going to the landfill.
Things That Aren’t Diapers:
Cotton Terry Cloth Wipes – 3 dozen, and it was another major money/plastic waste saver. They’re useful for so many other things, highly recommended. Wet ’em down, wipe a bum or a spill or a peanut butter face, toss in laundry bucket. They come in hemp and bamboo and all kids of nice fabrics now.
Diaper Spray – Once we finished a natural store-bought diaper spray that was gifted to us, we never used anything other than water to wipe our kids’ bums, though I did find a lot of recipes for gentle diaper sprays online that use castile soap, essential oils, etc. If you’re going low-chemical, start with just water and see if you like it; I found there was no need to buy a plastic-encased product or spend time making one.
Spray Bottle – A 4 oz stainless steel spray bottle from Whole Foods near the essential oils for under $5 – fill with filtered water for spraying wipes and keep in the diaper bag. You could also use a sports cap water bottle for a better soak.
Diaper Bag – I don’t like bulky pocket-heavy diaper bags, so we used an assortment of things, most notably a Patagonia shoulder bag and then a 1980s fashionable polka dot tote my mother in law found in her attic. I enjoyed the irony of having pink diaper bags for our boys and the Hubs didn’t mind, so it was a nice little private joke for myself. Anything works.
Wet Bag – Perhaps the most disappointing realization of cloth diapering is that the longer you are out and about with dear tinkling Junior, the heavier your bag is going to get. Instead of bundling up his 2 ounces of urine in a disposable diaper and popping it into the nearest trash can, you are now carrying on your shoulder the former contents of his kidneys. Still worth it, just disappointing. Anything waterproof works for a wet bag, we registered for a no frills zippered bag that fits six or eight wet prefolds and it worked fine. When I forget to pack the wet bag, I often receive back from my parents dirty prefolds in plastic bagel bags – just shake off the poppy seeds and rinse! When your kids get older the wet bag is great for segregating wet items in the swimming pool bag.
Pail Liner (Giant Wet Bag) – If you have a tall upright laundry basket, you can line it with a waterproof pail liner. You can also just hang the pail liner from a towel rack if you are closet deficient. Then your partner can hoist it over their shoulder and say “Ho ho ho, I’m Poopy Claus!” on the way down to the basement. Parent humor. Currently we use a tall step trash can that has a pull out plastic bin – I like this system a lot more than the wet bag because I don’t have to wring the diapers out as much. Though it’s really heavy to carry up and down two flights of stairs.
Creams and Goos for Rash – Neither of our babies have experienced a lot of diaper rash, though nothing makes you feel like a terrible parent quite the way an oozing, bleeding hot spot will. We used a tube or two of CJ’s Butt Butter, some other natural substances in tins, and eventually settled on organic coconut oil. We have small glass jars of coconut oil in various places in the home, and in the diaper bag – it’s antiviral, antifungal, easy to replace from our kitchen stash, and generally seems to keep the boys’ fairly sensitive skin pleased. Also, if your children eat everything the way ours do, it’s no problem when JrJr sticks his chubby paw into the cream when you aren’t looking – it’s edible! In general, I don’t think zinc based creams are suggested for cloth diapers, do your reading, but I will say that my mom occasionally uses something thick and white on JrJr’s bum when he’s at her house and it seems to be washing out of the diapers just fine. Make sure your coconut oil container seals tightly if you live in a warm climate because it liquefies at 76 degrees! In general, rash is inevitable, everyone and their mother will tell you exactly what to do about it, your pediatrician will try to get you to buy a cream you won’t want to buy, and you will feel really guilty for neglecting your kid’s bum until it bled. You’re not a horrible parent, it happens. Go with your gut, let their buns run free in the fresh air if you can, change more frequently, don’t beat yourself up.
Sleep Sack – If you’re doubling up on inserts so you don’t have to change a diaper at night, you’ll find lots of pajamas won’t fit. Sleep sacks are a great alternative to pajama bottoms, keeping baby bundled up but not constrictive. We were gifted a Disana wool sleep sack, so even if it got damp inside it still retained heat and the bed was kept dry. Despite how often it got leaked on, I don’t think I washed it more than two or three times. (A side note about wool: it’s amazing. Naturally waterproof, retains heat even when wet, doesn’t retain odor. If you’re REALLY into cloth diapering, like the mom I talked to recently on kid number five, you can get wool covers and wool pants to go over your prefolds. Check it out on the interwebs.)
ROUTINE AND RHYTHM
To understand a cloth diapering routine, I introduce to you: The Spectrum of Grossness.
A dirty cloth diaper has many types: blowout poopy (everywhere), some poop (edges), contained poop (center), stinky (overnight urine), wet (regular urine), damp (you probably didn’t have to change it yet but now you feel bad putting it back on). Sometimes, especially if baby is teething, the poops are slimy, oily, and won’t let go; sometimes they peel perfectly off the diaper in one easy spray. Depending on where a cover or insert is on this spectrum, here’s what I do at the end of each day:
Daily Dirty Diaper Maintenance
1. Remove the big poop.
2. Rinse out urine and poop residue.
3. Wring and store both the prefolds and gross covers in laundry bucket.
4. Hand wash any less-gross covers that can be used again.
In our house, anything that is dirty goes into the gross bucket, which is a plastic trash can, no lid: diapers anywhere on the above spectrum, covers that are any kind of dirty, and wipes. At the end of each day, a grownup usually called mom collects any dirty diapers from around the house (we have a downstairs bucket too, and don’t forget to look in the diaper bag if you were brave enough to leave the house that day!) and gets all these items clean enough to be transferred to the laundry bucket. The laundry bucket is NOT the laundry basket; that is where people put dirty clothes. Diapers are not laundry, they are diapers, because: poop.
Various components of dirty diapers can be dealt with several ways:
Pre-Rinse Like A Pro
1. Toilet Time: For the intrepid, simply hold them by the least poopy corners and swish the poopiest part in the toilet. That’s right, the grown up human toilet. The poop will hopefully dissolve and detach. Now the prefold is simultaneously more gross and less gross. Don’t touch it more than you have to. Perhaps even wear rubber gloves. Actually it doesn’t matter, this is your new life now: full of poop. Put it back in the gross bucket because man, is it still gross.
2. Bucket Brigade: Fill a bucket (different than the gross bucket) half full of water. Start with your urine-only diapers, so you can do a whole day’s worth in this water. Swish and wring, place in laundry bucket. Proceed as above for poopy diapers, the poop generally sinks. Wring. Transfer. When you’re done, you can then dump the contents of the bucket down the toilet. BUT it will be rather murky at the bottom, so make extra sure there aren’t any small cloth wipes floating around in there. They are technically flushable, as in, they didn’t immediately ruin our plumbing, but it cannot be good for your pipes.
3. Tub Time: If you are blessed with no poops that day, and your kid takes a bath, just leave the bath water in the tub and use the tub to rinse diapers. Saves water!
4. High Class Diaper Sprayer: We purchased from Home Depot this diaper sprayer. It connects to your toilet and shares the water supply. This gives you a very sharp jet of water on demand for spraying off the poop. The jet is so sharp that it makes me cringe every time I ponder the box’s insistence that the sprayer is a “Diaper Sprayer OR Bidet”…yeowwwwch. If you’re in it to win it with cloth diapers, get the diaper sprayer. It’s not expensive and it’s not hard to install. Also toddlers love it, which you will not love. However, it is tremendously helpful to make a collar for your sprayer to keep your bathroom floor dry. This consists of…
5. Diaper Sprayer Collar: Go to IKEA and get a $1.29 plastic trash cans. Cut off the lowest segment of the trash can. Place it in your toilet seat. See how it just floats there? Now lay your dirty diaper over the side, add a clothespin if you like. You’ve got two free hands now, which means you can spray with one and bat away JrJr with the other, since he insists on going splishy splashy with his chubby little fingers in the toilet water.
6. Hand Wash Covers: If your cover just smells a little bit like urine, you can rinse and hang. If it is an overnight cover and stinks, you can lather it up with a Dr Bronner’s type bar soap or liquid soap, rinse it, and hang it to dry. This is usually worth it if you don’t have lots of extra covers, because there are always some poopy ones unavailable in the laundry bucket.
Once you have done these things, your nightly routine is basically over. If you’re keeping up and Junior isn’t pooping every change, which goes in waves for us, sometimes it can take as few as 5 minutes. If you’ve taken a few days off and you have a mountain of diapers to spray, cue up a favorite podcast because you’re going to be bent over the porcelain throne for a good 30 minutes. A few shortcuts:
Shortcuts
1. Throw the stinky nighttime diaper into the bottom of the shower in the morning. If you or your spouse shower before work, it will be rinsed by the end of the shower.
2. On days you’re really killing it, dunk poopy diapers in the toilet as soon as they come off of Junior’s bum. Then in the evening, you only have to rinse and wring, no poops to deal with.
3. While the kids are in the tub – assuming they are able to do so safely – use the toilet and diaper sprayer to vanquish the day’s poop. Then use the leftover tub water to rinse and wring. Does this cause a ring around the tub faster than regular bathing? Probably. Make your partner scrub the tub.
4. Perhaps the most crucial shortcut of all wasn’t available to us – if your washing machine has a pre-rinse cycle, you may decide you don’t even need to rinse and wring urine soaked diapers, just keep them in the laundry bucket and let the machine do the initial rinse before adding soap. Our washing machine has no option like this, but a friend was telling me his does; sounds glorious.
Speaking of which, on to washing.
Washing Cloth Diapers
Dirty diapers shouldn’t sit in the bin more than 3 days; they will usually let you know by their odor. When you notice your clean stack is getting low, grab the laundry bucket and head to the washing machine. We wash as hot as possible, which for us involves running a hose from the hot tap in our slop sink into the machine (pro tip: get a better washing machine than we own!) I usually pick a load size that is one higher than the quantity of diapers, so if it is a small load, I set it for a Medium load, on the Whites setting, Normal. I have no idea what these words actually mean, and neither does our washing machine’s unhelpful manual. Nellie’s Laundry Soda has worked well for us – throw diapers, covers, and wipes in once the soap has dissolved, and let the machine do its thing.
Don’t send covers through the dryer – anything else can be blasted with heat or, to remove yellow or green poop stains, hung on a clothes line in the sunshine. Poop stains are part of diaper life, but for our first baby I was a little sad to put him in hand-me-down prefolds, and sometimes I would try to sun bleach the stains out. By the second kid, I didn’t give a rip. Wool dryer balls are really helpful. If there is any dampness left in the diapers, add some time and keep running them or they will smell a bit funky.
Many people have issues and preferences with their washing machines, especially High Efficiency ones, their soap (some swear normal higher-chemical brands like Tide work great; on the other extreme you can make your own laundry detergent from items like natural bar soap, borax, and soap nuts), residue in the machine, smells in the diapers, etc. Again, the internet is full of resources but this basic system has worked well for us.
If you buy your prefolds new, they will arrive larger and flatter than you expect them to be. They will need to be conditioned: washed in the machine until they shrink up and become absorbent. Expect to run them and dry them on hot four or five times in a row. This seems wasteful and sad, but it’s just what has to happen. It also flushes all the manufacturing chemicals out of the fabric, so that’s good for Junior’s buns.
Take a Little Trip with Pee-ee
We don’t travel much with small people, but when visiting family for several nights, we always take as many clean diapers as we have and sometimes even carry along the dirty ones too. Expect to wash while you’re away, and definitely take your own soap and a pail liner sized wet bag with you. A garbage bag works but make sure no one throws away your diapers by accident, eep.
You Can Pants If You Want To
If you like to put your kid in hip skinny jeans or cute girl leggings, keep in mind that cloth diapered bums are adorably huge. Our boys’ hind quarters are always 6 months ahead of their top halves; so a 12 months shirt always gets an 18 months pant. A stretchy jersey legging (Carter’s) always works much better than any kind of jean or pants; overalls (Oshkosh, Old Navy) tend to work fairly well too. If you like clothes and shopping, there are plenty of specialty cloth diaper pants companies out there, Etsy is a good place to start.
STILL TO COME: The Final Count and also photos
If we had purchased all diapering items I mentioned from GreenMountainDiapers.com and other accessories in bold in this post, here’s what our monthly amortized diaper spending would be to date for two children: XX
potty training – no pull ups
swim diaper except for that one party foul pooped in the pool
Feeling Overwhelmed? Of Course You Are!
If you don’t have kids yet, you may think this sounds like a lot of laundry. It sure is! But it will just get absorbed into the massive quantities of spit-up-upon clothing, barfy bedding, and collateral damage items (adult clothes, the couch, your hair) that come with small people in the home. This is your life now, but it’s worth it. Parenting is messy and requires a constant recalibration of routine. The moment you feel like you’re in a great rhythm and you’ve finally hacked it, someone will get sick or hit a growth spurt or change their entire approach to sleeping/eating/pooping/wearing clothing. Hang in there, reach out to others for support, laugh about everything as much as you can. It takes a village to raise a child, and the love brought into everyone’s lives by said child will far outweigh the vast quantities of poop that come with it.
Was this post helpful? Would you like to add some advice for others? Email me: waexy66@gmail.com.