Why I do NOT use cloth diapers

A friend of mine recently ran a series on her blog about why she uses cloth diapers.  For starters, if you have an infant, or are pregnant, or just want to learn a lot from a really neat lady, you should go read this. Now.   I’ll wait. 

Didn’t you love it?  Didn’t it make you want to move to Taiwan, have your kids play on a playground made out of brightly colored rubber tires, and use cloth diapers?  That’s what it did for me.  I mentioned that I wanted to make the switch to Sloan.  He replied, “You can think your friend is cool without switching to cloth.  Using cloth diapers to be like someone else is lame.” 
And it is lame. 

But so is not giving any thought about your parenting decisions. 

Now let me say that it’s none of my darned business what you put on your kids’ bum so long as you never ask me to wipe said bum.  I also don’t think using cloth diapers makes you a better parent (nor does my buddy Kristie) and I resent all of you peeps who make me feel guilty about using disposable diapers.  (I also want you to stop judging me for every single time I forget to take my own bags to the grocery store.  I own them.   Loads of them.  I just only remember them a third of the time.  So get off my back already!)    But we should make informed decisions.  And I feel like Kristie’s posts on cloth diapering informed me a lot about cloth diapers other than what I already knew which was merely that with a ribbon sewn on the bottom, cloth diapers make a great burp cloth.

That said, in response, I want to tell you why I do NOT use cloth diapers.  (Please note that while Kristie’s post are serious, well thought out, and informative—my main goals here are to say why I don’t use them and also to make you laugh.)

1.        I don’t care (that much) about chemicals.

I began asking for an epidural just minutes after Henry’s zygote was injected into me with a turkey baster and I had to take various pharmaceuticals just to keep in my womb.  My daughter was born addicted to methadone, cocain, and heroin.  So the LAST thing I’m worried about is disposable diapers causing some sort of bum-fungus. 

2.        I am not a hippie.

Now, to be clear, some of my best friends are hippies.  My friend M tells me that when I say hippie I really mean outdoorsy or from the west coast.  You may say the phrase crunchy, granola, outdoorsy, earthy, health-concious.  But this is Elizabethtown, and I like the phrase “hippy-dippy”.  It makes me think of my Chocos and adults in pigtails; two things I ADORE.

So, to let you know what I DO mean by hippie, in Elizabethtown, here is MY definition of hippie.  If two or more of the following statements are true about you, you are a hippie:

1.        You have hair to your waist and are not Crystal Gale, a middle school girl, or a stripper. (Bonus hippie points if you part your hair in the middle.)

2.       Shop exclusively at Whole Foods or another boutique grocery store where they don’t even HAVE plastic grocery bags.

3.       Grow all of your own produce using homemade compost as fertilizer.

4.       Own chickens.  (My sister has chickens.  Because, you know, having 8 kids doesn’t make her life hectic enough.  I feel like everyone is getting chickens.  My friend A said, “Is this what we’re doing now?  Getting chickens?”  No A.  This is NOT what WE are doing.  Also, because chickens poo EVERYWHERE!!!!!)

5.       Use cloth diapers. 

6.       Wear your baby in a homemade sling everywhere, at all times, until they are in seventh grade and you tell people who are wearing  their child in a Baby Bjorn that they are going to give their child hip dysplasia like some aged Golden Retriever.  (Not that a woman in the Post Office ever said anything like that to me or anything.)

7.       Are over 25 and wear any of the following on a REGULAR basis:  hemp jewelry, anklets with jingle bells, toe rings, wooden beads, and long flowy skirts.  (Bonus hippie points if all worn at the same time to a Phish concert.)

Do NOT confuse my beloved hippies with the DIRTY HIPPIE.  The dirty hippie is anyone for whom ANY of the following statements are true:

1.     Are a white person with chunky, ratty dreadlocks.  Seriously.  You look ridiculous.  People with kinky coiled hair can have dreds and still look put together and clean.  That is because it is a natural protective style not requiring bucket loads of wax, pomade, and back-combing to achieve for persons with that hair texture.  So please, take out all of you hair earrings and shave your head already.

2.    Use your body hair as a means of protest.  Really?  Is that armpit hair really "sticking it to the man"?  At least change out of your tube top and oh, by the way, a crystal doesn’t work that well as deodorant.

3.    Have EVER, and I mean EVER, EVER,EVER used patchouli.  I don’t care if it comes from the mint family.  It does NOT smell minty.

(If you find that YOU are a DIRTY HIPPIE, please stop reading this now and take a shower.) 

3.        I like to throw crap away.

Remember how I never take my bags to the grocery store?  I use those plastic baggies to put my poopy disposable diapers in.  Then they get tossed on my front porch.  And then, usually once I’m embarrassed about there being 3 (or 8?) bags of poop on my porch do I get around to yelling at Sloan to take taking them out to the trash can.  (So you heard it here first, neighborhood kids, should you want to set a bag of poo on fire on my front porch, just bring matches.  The poo is already there.)

Also, I can not envision a world where I have a bag full of dirty nappies across my shoulder.  Seriously.  I’ve been known to leave a milk-filled sippy cup in my car until the offending milk becomes a hard blue puck, so there’s no way I could always remember to empty my diaper bag of poo and pee laden nappies.  And I don’t care if after the initial investment of cloth diapers is paid off and cloth diapering makes it cheaper in the long run, you would have to pay me large sums of money to tote poo. 

4.        Speaking of money, my time is worth money.

I’m already drowning in a sea of laundry.  Sometimes it literally makes me cry.  If I had to dump out poo from my purse into my washing machine, I would need some type of prescription.  And I think if you have to take Xanax to follow through with a parenting decision, you’ve probably made the wrong one. 

5.        To save the environment, carpool.

This one gets me riled up.  Sure, I’m putting diapers in a landfill.  But to wash all those cloth diapers requires detergent, oodles of drying time, water, and electricity.  Seriously.  Most of the cloth diapers suggest washing and drying them 6 times before using them to obtain maximum absorbency.  So to all the Hollywood elite who spout off about carbon-footprints, how many of you carpooled to the Oscars? Yeah, thought so.  That’s what I call an Inconvenient Truth. 

In the end, my friend Kristie chose cloth because she likes it.  It suits her lifestyle.  She began cloth diapering with her first child and I’m certain after her third kid that she has saved hundreds of dollars.  I don’t doubt that.  She also suggests that cloth diapers are cuter.  To that I say, really?  Cuter than this?

 And this?

Yeah.  I didn't think so.