Cloth diapering from a new dad’s perspective, by Mike (co-owner of Bodacious Babies Boutique, LLC)

January 2008

I’m a strong believer in cloth diapering.  They’re easy to put on.  They’re reusable.  My son’s tushie looks cute in them.  But it wasn’t always this way.

When our son was born, I didn’t think twice about using disposable diapers.  It seemed like I had a million things to learn about being a dad, and whether or not to cloth diaper wasn’t even on the radar.  At first, I thought disposable diapers were terrific.  Every time Noah peed, all I had to do was take off the old diaper, wipe him down, and then slap a new one on my little buckaroo.  At a couple of dozen diapers a day, however, my enthusiasm for disposable diapers quickly waned.

The first thing I noticed was that no matter how well we fastened the diapers, we had a major accident at least every day.  We began co-sleeping with our baby almost immediately, and leaky diapers at night meant more laundry and less sleep during the day. When we ran out of diapers, it always seemed to happen at the worst possible time—usually when I had just gotten home from work.  All I wanted at that point was to spend some time with my wife and son, but instead I was scouring the diaper aisles of the local drug stores and supermarkets.  And the sheer volume of garbage we created with disposable diapers made me feel just awful.  I couldn’t turn the TV set on without hearing a new story about global warming, and here I was filling three Diaper Genies a week.

One day Shanna asked me what I thought about cloth diapering.  Initially, I was a skeptic.  Sure, I wasn’t enamored with disposable diapers, but were cloth diapers really an alternative?  All I could think about were diaper pins and endless piles of stinky laundry.  But then I remembered some advice a patient of mine had recently given me.  He and his wife had just celebrated their 50th anniversary, and I asked him what was their secret—what could I do to ensure an equally long and happy marriage?  His answer was simple: If two people are in love, no disagreement is really so important that it’s worth putting the marriage in jeopardy.  If I thought I might be on the brink of saying something stupid or hurtful, I’d be better off keeping my mouth shut and focusing instead on how to make my wife happy.  So when my wife said she would like to spend $15 to $20 a piece on cloth diapers, my response was an enthusiastic, “Sounds great, baby.  Let’s do it!”