October 26, 2011

Not Giving Up. Just Thinking About It. Sort Of.

Pretty soon, I'm going to talk about poop. Just so you know.

First though, the top of my washing machine. (Where the poop lives.)

When we switched to cloth diapers for Jr back in April, it was motivated purely by cheapskatery. By our (painstaking, if you've forgotten) calculations, cloth diapers save us money.

But - news flash! - they don't save us time. Like every other cheap thing - CRAPPIT! - cloth diapers take so much more time to use than disposables.

Sorry, let's back up. (Further away from the poop, I know, but don't worry. We'll get there.) See, the problem isn't the amount of time cloth diapers take to rinse and wash and dry and fold, it's the fact that we have to do that Every. Other. Day.

If you remember (how could you forget) all the navel gazing surrounding the momentous cloth diaper decision, particularly this conversation, you'll know that we started with 24 cotton prefolds, 24 washcloth wipes, 12 Bummis fleece liners, 2 small wetbags, and 6 Thirsties Duo Diaper Wraps. Since then, we've had to get 12 more washclothes, 6 more liners, one larger wetbag, and that cursed diaper sprayer.


And every bit of that extra cost was because of daycare.

Because of daycare - and poop.

(Ah, there we are. Finally.)

When we're at home, poop gets rinsed right away. Not so at daycare. At daycare, it gets left in the diaper. They're not set up to rinse. (I'm over it, despite what you might surmise from this post.)

Not only that, but for some reason Jr goes through twice as many diapers and covers when he's at daycare than when he's at home, turning my three or four day cache of supplies into enough for only two. Sometimes one.

This means that every other day - sometimes every day, if I'm an extra lucky girl - I drag that big old bag o'poop home from daycare and spend a whole lot of time rinsing (and gagging, depending on what stage of pregnancy I happen to be in.)

And it's making me seriously consider switching back to disposables for daycare. Which - as dear Leslie reminds me every day at work, is for only 96 days.

And that's why there's a bag of poop on top of my washing machine.