Cloth Diapering Twins: The Switch

So...

...we made a switch.  

{Fellow cloth diapering nerds can follow our diapering saga: part one and part two.}

While I still enjoy my beloved prefolds and wool covers, they were impractical for us anytime we left the house.  Wool isn't exactly water-repellent, so while the covers hold up pretty well all it takes is a couple good soakings for it to leak through and dampen their clothes.  Which never really happened while at home (they get changed often enough), but I can't always guarantee the frequency of changes when we're out of the house.  Also it's a lot to schlep around in a diaper bag: prefolds, doublers, and extra covers (always times two!) take up precious real estate that I don't have.  

Okay, no big deal, just slap a disposable diaper on there and away we go.

And that's what we did for awhile.  We weren't going through that many disposables, and were still able to wear cloth while at home.  Except.  Then we started leaving the house more and more, especially as the weather got nicer.  Caden and Brooklyn love to go "bye bye", so when we're gone twice a day, often for a good chunk of the morning and the afternoon, plus their disposables hold so much wetness and keep them feeling dry, they don't really need to be changed all that often.  So more often than not, we went entire days in disposables, which made our cloth diapering stash seem unnecessary.

Add in the fact that they were starting to grow out of the medium-sized prefolds (which have lasted us since last August) (!!!!!) and it seemed time to start shopping around.  A few people I know use Best Bottoms, so that's what I went with.

Two weeks in: so far, so good.  We do like them.  The ease of snapping an insert in is great. The covers are actually trimmer than our prefold/wool combo, so they fit under their clothes a lot nicer (though still bulkier than a disposable).  We can even (get this!) wear them ALL NIGHT, something we abandoned with our prefolds long ago because of the aforementioned soaking-their-clothes-through-the-wool-cover problem.  (As well as the fact that there didn't seem to be enough doublers/inserts in the world to keep Caden dry at night.)

So, not only are we still cloth diapering, we're actually cloth diapering more than we used to.

The downsides: poop.  With the prefolds, everything stayed contained on the prefold and even in our flushable liners.  The wool covers rarely got dirty anymore.  The Best Bottoms tend to cause some spillage off the snap-in insert and onto the inside of the cover, which is easy to clean/wipe down, but, y'know, the whole Ick Factor.  It also takes longer to change than a prefold, unless you have a new cover ready to go with an insert all snapped in, which I'm not accustomed to doing yet.  Tyson and I were pros at quick prefold changes, but we're not quite there yet with all the unsnapping, resnapping, etc.  We'll get there.  We also could use more covers (we have two for him and two for her right now, one each of snap and Velcro since I prefer snaps and Tyson prefers Velcro) (I KNOW I'm a snap convert! However I think it's easier now to fit their (still scrawny) thighs in snap covers snugly, without the newborn chicken legs that always left a gap.) but I'm hoping to find some at a discount instead of buying more full price.  However we wash fairly often, (mostly because we could ALSO use more inserts.  See: I'm cheap, would like at a discount, etc.), so it's not so terrible. It's also probably slightly more expensive than our old system, though not by much since I favored wool covers at forty bucks a pop.

The covers are also pretty versatile.  You don't have to use a snap insert with them.  I've thrown in a prefold (folded in thirds) when I've run out of the snap-in inserts, and used a regular cotton insert on top of a snap-in for extra coverage.  I feel like a cloth diaper ninja now, you know the ones.  The ones who blog about how they purchased cloth diapering system X, but use the inserts and fitteds from system Y, and combine it all with some bamboo-hemp-chamomile-save-the-trees liners that they grew in their backyard and sewed together themselves.  Okay, I'm not quite there yet, but I'm glad we have both options to work with.

{This cloth diapering message brought to you by Caden and the letter C, for this is oh so Comfortable.}

Post Weekend

(I mentioned this on Facebook, but this is Brooklyn's reaction to climbing up to the top of the tallest slide on the playground in the time it took me to put Caden in the swing and give him a push.  When I turned my back she was NOWHERE NEAR the stairs or even the ginormous play structure at all.  She then refused to go down the slide.  It was kind of a let down.)

(This seemingly angelic charmer, on the other hand, climbed up to the top of the tallest slide several times (while SURPERVISED, I might add) and threw himself down as fast as he could.)

Summer is tricky in the Midwest.  I feel like it's a balance of "It's summer!  We need to do this, this, and THIS!  Right now!  Let's go!" and "let's do absolutely nothing at all".

This weekend, I think we had a little of each.

Saturday: the Farmer's Market.  Our first of the season.

Brooklyn and I made a new friend while we were there:

I'd like to say I got into abstract photography while we perused the Market, but really that's the best picture I could get of the dairy cow that Brooklyn and I met, since there were 349 other people and their kids pressing up behind me also trying to see the same cow.  Like nobody around here has ever seen a cow before.  Durn city folks.  Yeesh.

(Yes, I am the city folk who had the cow's...owner?  handler? take a picture of me and my kid with the cow.  I am that person.)

Brooklyn then jammed with some of the street performers.

I have a bunch more pictures of Brooklyn at the Farmer's Market, and absolutely none of Caden.  I guess that's something for him to take up with his therapist someday.

Sunday was our do nothing day.

Ingredients: One cheap kiddie pool.  Warm water.  Four plastic party cups.  Two toddlers in swimsuits.

Directions:  Fill pool with water.  Add toddlers and cups.  Let sit and play for as long as possible.

(Mischievous Caden looks mischievous.)

(This counts as a bath, right?)

We'll be out here all summer, all pruny and waterlogged.

Life Lately

They help!

Sorta.

Kinda.

Caden may have just been taking my clean laundry from the basket and putting it in the dryer.  And then taking it out of the dryer and putting it back in the basket.  Repeat.  For about a half hour.  (#atleastitwascleanunderwear)

Caden is actually a really good helper, and will hand me laundry to fold and put away, dishes out of the dishwasher as I'm unloading, food out of the grocery bags to put in the cabinets, and he loves to throw things in the garbage.  He's also usually the first to do something when I tell them to...depending on where we are, "bye bye" either sends him to the entry looking for his shoes, or running for the stroller so we can leave the park.  "Come here" usually elicits a grin and a wobbly run-walk back to where I need him to be.  (Brooklyn's "helping" skillz, on the other hand, are more hit or miss.)

They play!

(No one is sick of toddler in the tub pictures yet, are they?)

(Good.)

And play!

And play some more!

(Yes, that is a lap diaper full of sand and pebbles right there.)

They grow!

They spent the last day in their infant car seats on Tuesday.  I'm not quite sure how that happened.

(Actually I sort of know how it happened.  It suddenly dawned on me about a week ago that hey-even though they are nowhere near the 30-pound weight limit of their infant car seats, they actually are somewhat on the tall side.  And come to think of it, we are kind of smooshing them in there more than we used to.  *Research session on height limit of current car seats*  They needed a new car seat oh, about an inch or two ago.)

They party!

Baby shower BBQ/life group celebration.  And in four-ish (???) years of meeting, I think this is the ONLY time that we've gotten a picture with the entire group.  Go figure, since some of our dear friends will be moving out-of-state in just a couple of weeks.

I would also like to point out that when we started, our "young married couples" life group had zero children.  Four-ish years later and there are five littles running around, with three on the way.  Guess that's what a "young married couples" label will do to ya, huh?