The Choices We Make

I had a few comments and questions asked after I posted about cloth diapers. After reflecting on it, I decided to write a little bit about our decision to cloth diaper.

Cloth diapers are the choice for us, but they certainly aren’t the only way to diaper a baby. As someone who has chosen to cloth diaper I often get a lot of strange looks, opposition from others, and lots and lots of questions. And while I could choose to be snobby about cloth diapers vs. disposables, especially to those who right away write me off as some crazy hippie who doesn't know what I am getting into, I've decided that the best thing to do is to educate those around me about why we choose to cloth diaper.

Generally I find that people respond so much better when they learn why you do something as opposed to being told that they need to make a change. I know I certainly don't like being told why my choices are wrong, especially without evidence and by those who have never tried my choice - sort of like when my dad said he hates spinach artichoke dip at the restaurant and I said well did you ever try it and he hadn't, and then after I convinced him to try it, he ended up eating almost half of it. But I digress...

Cloth diapering is a decision we made as a family for very specific reasons. If people are cloth diapering for the novelty of it (which I could see happen since some of this stuff is just so gosh darn cute!) they may feel less committed to full time. For us, we want cloth diapering to be just another part of our life. There is no thinking about it and constantly wondering if we should just go buy a box of disposables, it just is. Kind of like wearing underwear everyday - we don't question it, we just do it!

Again, I understand that it may not work for everyone but this is the decision we've made. I've heard a lot of "oh you'll still need some disposable diapers," "what about when you are not at home?" and "you should still have disposables for traveling." I see where people would have those concerns, however with today's cloth diapering systems, all of those reasons for keeping around disposables are no longer valid. Resorting to using disposables for convenience just isn’t an option for us.

The main reasons we decided to use cloth are as follows:

• Healthier option for our baby
• Better option for the environment
• Kinder to our budget
• Makes the most sense to us given that we plan to have more children

In my quest to educate others, I plan to follow up this post with posts focusing on each of the reasons that led us to our decision to choose cloth. It's not my goal to convert every person in the world to cloth diapering. As I said, I realize it's not the choice for everyone, but I want to educate others as to why it is our choice. If that creates some converts along the way as my friends' stories have converted me, then so be it.

And of course I realize that all of this is coming from a mother-to-be who has not yet placed a single cloth diaper on a baby. However I hope you will take this as an opportunity to follow along in our journey and see how it turns out instead of dismissing my commentary all together.