Freedom of Cloth Blog Carnival

Just a quick post tonight to share something I found today. Over at Natural Parents Network they are hosting a "Freedom of Cloth Diaper Blog Carnival" for seven days, and featuring many articles regarding a specific cloth diapering topic each day this week. Yesterday, for example, was "Cloth Diapering Must Haves" and a bunch of blogging mamas gave their input on any and every accessory you might need for cloth diapering. Monday was all about recipes related to cloth diapering - homemade laundry detergent, baby wipe solution, etc. If you are interested in cloth diapering at all, you should join me in checking out the "carnival" this week. So much great information, and you can never know too much about something like cloth diapering :)

Healthy Choices for Baby

I am now 25 weeks pregnant, and I couldn't be more grateful for that. Baby V is moving all around in my tummy, and I can feel her every day now. I can feel her punching, kicking, and doing somersaults, but they are gentle and still somewhat muffled because of the anterior (front) position of the placenta. Our next OB check with my perinatologist is in a week, and we have another detailed growth ultrasound scheduled. I'm looking forward to seeing how much she has developed and grown since the last one at 18 weeks!

Judging by my growing baby bump belly and her activity in there, she is thriving. I pray for her every day, that she'll be healthy and not ever have any of the health problems I've had to deal with. God is in charge of her physical development, and we trust Him to take care of her. Meanwhile, Hubs and I have been discussing the healthy choices we want for our family, so we can give her every advantage from an environmental aspect. I thought I'd share them here with you all.

Before I share my big three, tell me: Do you do any of these things for your family? Do you have any other ideas to add?

Decision 1:

We are going to use cloth diapers and cloth baby wipes with our own cleaning solution, so we have control over the chemicals (or rather, so we can avoid the chemicals) that will be touching our baby's skin every day. Before we were even halfway through this pregnancy, Hubs and I read enough about the [toxic] chemicals in disposables (Dioxin, TBT, SAP) to commit to cloth without looking back.
Plus, the environmental bonus feels good. We won't be contributing to the huge mountains of little "poop bombs" sitting across our country in landfills. Did you know that disposable diapers take 500 years to break down? Yikes! Do you think that at some point our communities need to come together and address the fact that our landfills aren't bottomless pits? Human waste belongs in the sewer where it can go through the proper treatment, not the ground where it can get into our water supply.
Moving on though :) As a one-income household, the financial bonus of using cloth is huge! We'll save thousands of dollars not buying diapers and wipes monthly for those first few years. Plus, we'll be able to keep our small garbage can with the city disposal service. (We pay $25 a month now, and it would cost around $50 a month for the larger can to fit all the disposables in each week - that's a 100% cost increase!) And maybe the best bonus of all: no diaper-stinky garbage cans in the house ;)

Decision 2:

We've decided we'll make our own baby food. It really couldn't be easier to do, and very economical because we'll just be pureeing and cooking the veggies and fruits we buy for ourselves. It won't really be a chore, because I enjoy working with food and cooking. I expect it to be a fun activity, and it will feel GREAT to know what goes in Baby's food - no preservatives or pesticides, or packaging chemicals like BPA. And again, as a one-income family it's a smart and simple money-saving choice for us.

Decision 3:
Of these three decisions, this one is most important to me. My greatest goal as a new mom is to breastfeed my baby. The many benefits, from financial (it's free!) to convenience on the go (no bottles or formula mix or water needed!) are obvious, and then the health benefits for Baby. With all of the auto-immune and inflammatory conditions my body struggles with, I am always interested in research and information about them. Did you know breastmilk can prevent a multitude of diseases, including Ulcerative Colitis (I have that), asthma (and that), allergies (those too), arthritis (yep, got it). I'm committed to do whatever it takes to make breastfeeding work!
Part of why it is so important to me is because I was 100% formula fed as a baby, because I was adopted. From the age of ten onward, I've developed one auto-immune disease after another. I can't deny that there seems to be a connection between being formula fed, and my current state of health. So, I've made one single goal for the first month post-partum, and that is to start a successful routine of exclusively breastfeeding my baby. I am going to structure those first few weeks around this one goal.
I'm going to ignore housework, take every opportunity to rest and relax, ask for and welcome help - whatever I can do to succeed at this. It means a LOT to me to try to reach this goal, because I want to give our little one the best advantage I can in case the genes passed on from me are anything but good ones. I am even planning to have a lactation consultant come to our home to work with us if need be.
I know that there are sometimes medical reasons for having to use formula, and we will cross that bridge if we have to. But having this goal in mind and setting us up for success is the best way I can make it happen!




I've been doing a lot of reading, and thinking, and talking with tons of mothers throughout my pregnancy, and I've come to the conclusion that many women do not make informed choices about their labor, delivery, and motherhood. And that's a shame. It's largely a cultural failure I think, because we aren't told the whole story or given options. But I think that as parents we need to know the whole story and be able to make our own informed choices. We need to be empowered with information, and know we're not at the mercy of any (well-meaning but uninformed) doctor, nurse, neighbor or even baby-gadget salesperson. We're going to be parents, and now is the time to ask questions and make decisions for our families with sound reasons behind them.

So get out there, moms and dads, and ask questions, learn, get support, and be confident in your choices! All you can do is give your best, with what you have, where you are. If you're doing that, you should be proud - you are a great parent :)

I Sewed Something!!

I have always wanted to sew, and sew well enough to make all sorts of fun creations that rival anything you can buy at a little boutique. Since being pregnant I've been inspired anew, and I am determined to become a good seamstress. Well. Last week I cut two receiving blankets and other flannel remnants into squares in preparation to hem them and start our cloth wipe stash. At a friend's suggestion, I doubled each flannel square to make it thicker and more durable, and used a zig-zag stitch on the highest width on my machine. It took me three days to finish hemming because of this cold I'm working through, but I kept working and just finished! I now have over forty homemade flannel wipes to wash and put away for Baby Girl. A great start!

I got the most experience I've ever had with my sewing machine this week. I had to wind the bobbin at least twice, rethread the needle MANY times, and I had several thread jams to fix. I'm still figuring out some of the machine's quirks and my own user errors. But I'm excited to keep sewing and start a new project. I found this free pattern at Wink Designs for baby skirts made of fat quarters, and I think this would be a good "intermediate" level project for me.

Cloth Diapering Pt. IV - All-Natural Baby Wipes

While I'm still undecided on what fabric to use for my homemade baby wipes, Hubs and I are both set on using cloth wipes as well as cloth diapering. We're both feeling great about the fact that we'll know exactly what is going to be next to Baby's skin, instead of being at the mercy of giant American companies that use all kinds of unpronounceable chemicals in their products (many of which aren't allowed even for adult products in Europe! ick!).

I think I've decided on the solution we'll use for our baby wipes. Here is the recipe:

1 cup water
1 tbsp. Baby Dr. Bronner's liquid castile
1 tbsp. apricot oil or almond oil
2 drops tea tree essential oil
5 drops lavender essential oil

I got the recipe from this great little article at Natural Family Online. I really enjoyed the article. It lists a very basic to do/must have list for new parents. It's like they read my mind and then wrote the article!
Hubs and I have been trying our hardest to stay away from all the little doo-dads and fancy accessories that the baby industry tries to get you to think you need when you're shopping for your first baby. I've been to enough baby showers and hung around enough experienced moms to know that much of that stuff is just not needed. My goal is to stick with what is simple, healthy, and necessary for my baby. The most important thing she needs, after all, is love and good care. Those things do not cost any money and make the most difference in a baby's life :)

Cloth Diapering Pt. III - "Number 2," and Washing Diapers

This is a great (and very extensive!) chart of cloth diaper-friendly detergents and their ratings and qualities. I love finding resources like this that someone took the time to create and share. Laundry costs for cloth diapering are less than the constant expense of disposable diapers, and if you are a greenie like me, you'll feel much better not adding to the baby poop sitting in the landfills. Did you know a disposable takes 500 years to break down? And that throwing out your baby's poopy diapers is a violatoin of the World Health Organization mandate, that human waste not be allowed in landfills? Every parent and caretaker of babies is supposed to be scraping the poop into the toilet with TP and flushing it. Which is funny, because that's the number one reason I hear parents give for not cloth-diapering - "it's gross; I don't want to touch the poop." Hmm.

With all the cool things that have been invented in the past decade, including diaper sprayers that attach to your toilet, and flushable liners, cloth diapering can be so easy and minimal on the gross-out factor. I feel good that our choice to cloth diaper is going to benefit humankind. I find it sad that it's the norm in our country to send off little "diaper bombs" to the landfill every week, never thinking of how we'll deal with it in a few years. Hubs made an impact to me when he said, "Well, now we know that my baby poop is still out there somewhere, preserved within a disposable diaper from 30 years ago." That was gross enough for me to commit to cloth 100% :)

Cloth Diapering Pt. II - Wool Covers

My first order of business in my cloth diaper sewing adventure is to zip off to the thrift store and see what kinds of old wool sweaters I can snag for next to nothing. See, I ran across pre-made wool diaper covers in the past few months while researching cloth diapers, but saw the cost and said, "Not happening." I considered knitting my own, and that's still a possibility.
Then I found these websites, one with the scoop on making your own wool diaper covers out of old wool sweaters, another with a pattern and instructions to do it, and yet another with instructions on how to lanolize and relanolize occasionally, to keep the moisture resistance. I will definitely post pics once I get this figured out. I can't imagine NOT sewing up four wool diaper covers for $5-10. Here I go!

(Yep, it's the same old Lanolin you might having laying around if you're breastfeeding!)

I think these wool covers made from old sweaters are the coolest thing EVER, especially the ones with pants attached:

Can you believe someone snagged these as old kids sweaters at a thrift store and sewed them into these darling covers and pants? I hope to create some covers as cute as these. Stay tuned! :)

Cloth Diapering Pt. I - We're Sold!

I am super passionate about cloth diapering already. I am getting so excited about it! Hubs and I are completely in agreement - and he got convinced all on his own!
We have done tons of research over the past few months, and talked to a good friend that cloth diapers her little girl. We decided that we'd like to use:

cotton prefolds

with Snappis,

under Thirsties covers

and wool covers;

and
FuzziBunz One Size AIO's (All-in-One's)

I was not initially looking at "modern" cloth diapers like FuzziBunz because I was intimidated by the price. Then a friend gave me her experience with them, and I realized - they are an innovative, amazing product, made by an American company started by a mom, and an INVESTMENT that will last us through one or two more babies. Incredibly easy-to-use and CUTE, colorful cloth diapers for a one-time cost - Wow, can't beat that! (Disposables are SO not a one-time cost!) I checked out the FuzziBunz website at her suggestion. From their FAQ page to the benefits of cloth diapering, even tips to make it MORE green. Check it out.
We figured out that we can buy one or two FuzziBunz OS diaper each month ($20 each) and have a good stock ready by the time she's born. FuzziBunz, AIO's, any cloth diapers are really very affordable when you look at it in little steps like this.

Here are some websites with free patterns for cloth diapers and accessories:
www.diapersewing.com
www.cheekydiapers.com
www.zany-zebra.com

This site has supplies for sewing, like PUL fabric for covers, and snaps for covers and AIO's: www.wahmsupply.com

I am thrilled at the idea that we will be done buying diapers and accessories a few months into our baby's life - once we have our stock, we get to stop buying diapers! We will have a sense of control over our finances and baby's health -cloth will not likely create rashes like disposables do, and there will be no icky chemicals seeping into baby's skin. I feel empowered. Depending on how much help we receive at our baby shower, I will make up the difference by saving and buying them ourselves, and doing some creative fabric hunting and sewing.