It has been a month and a half since the little one arrived. We're still sleep-deprived, but things are getting a little bit better in that regard. Tom was in DC for two conferences this past week, so I was a single parent. It was hard to be without that extra pair of hands to take the baby when I wanted to nap or take a bath, but Julia behaved pretty well. I'm really looking forward to Tom's return later today, though!
Julia now weighs 10 pounds, so we may be moving to the next diaper size pretty soon! We have a LOT of size 1 diapers due to a diaper cake from Tom's sister, mom and grandma at the shower in December, as well as two more packages that have come from Tom's co-workers and our neighbors. Of course, seeing how quickly we go through them, our bounty of diapers probably won't go as far as I imagine.
April has been the month of visitors, and we saw Tom's sister and her family over Easter, followed by my brother and his family the next week, some friends from Madison (including their beautiful daughter Julia, who was nice enough to share her lovely name with our daughter), and then Tom's trip to DC. My sister is coming the first week of May, so things have been pretty hectic! In addition to it being great to see everyone, Tom's sister delivered another van-load full of hand-me-down baby items, including clothes and toys for the first year of life with baby. The best things were a gliding chair and an activity mat, both of which preserve my sanity on a daily basis!
Yes, this is Tom putting a fork into a bucket of cole slaw. When we had a lot of visitors, we got the cole slaw as a side dish and then forgot to put it out. Oops! So Tom was doing his part to eat up $14 worth of cole slaw.
Best Invention Ever: The flashlight nail-clipper
Babies' nails are sharp and result in many little scratches on her and on you if not kept in check. They are also notoriously hard to clip, both because they are so amazingly small and because it is nearly impossible to keep those little fingers still in order to cut the nails. Julia came out of the womb in need of a manicure, so I was glad to have received the most amazing clipper at my shower in December. At the time, I didn't realize that it would be such a lifesaver! It is a baby nail clipper with a built-in flashlight so you can clip while they are nursing or sleeping. Once you try to clip their nails at any other time and realize the futility of the situation, you will be thrilled to have these babies. They are from Safety First (sometimes online as Safety 1st) "Sleepy Baby Clippers" and I would recommend them to ANY new parents! They are available at Babies R'Us stores, but they don't seem to be on their website, so just look in the store.
Amazing Welcome Baby Gifts
Our friends and families have been so wonderful and we have received many thoughtful and generous gifts. In addition, Tom's mom threw me another shower two weekends ago! Julia now has a wardrobe that any child would envy. Here is a picture of Julia that represents three of the great gifts we have received: She is on a stuffed sheep pillow from my Uncle
Tom, Aunt Nadine and cousin Alexis in Chicago. The pillow also folds over so it could be used as a pillow by an older child. She is also wearing one of the cutest newborn outfits with little blue and purple butterflies from Tom's Aunt Joan (see the detail picture below showing the built-in Mary Jane shoes--adorable!), and our friends Dave and Kathleen in DC sent us stickers for each month of the baby's first year. What a great way to mark these milestones and not have to look at the date on your pictures to figure out when it was taken. Very cool!The Diaper Conundrum
We are well aware of how two zillion disposable diapers go into landfills every day and we do not want to be part of the problem. However, when you actually get baby home, the question of weighing your sanity with the ease of a diaper system makes disposables really a necessity, at least in the first weeks/months of having a newborn at home. It's not that we don't care about the environment; in fact, this diaper issue is something that troubles us a great deal. When it comes to diapers, you seem to have three choices:
-Cloth
-Disposable
-Hybrid disposable/cloth
Cloth
We really wanted to go the environmentally-friendly cloth diaper route, but have been thwarted from the start. First I looked for a cloth diaper service that would deliver clean diapers and pick up dirty ones. There used to be numerous diaper services in the Twin Cities, but now there is ONE remaining and it doesn't serve our town since we're not in the two main counties that comprise Minneapolis and St. Paul. Then we thought about the old-school do-it-yourself cloth route, but when you are talking 15-20 diapers per day (the first few weeks), it just didn't seem feasible. This is not to mention the issue of the disposal of the poo. Our mothers didn't exactly help sell us on cloth diapers when they both recounted how they would rinse the poopy diapers in the toilet and then let them sit in a bucket of water and bleach until it was time to launder everything. I care deeply about the environment, but I just couldn't fathom doing this, at least not while we're still at this stage of high-volume diaper usage. I can barely keep up with the laundry I have now; I don't know how I could handle diapers on top of the other items.
Disposable
We know, we know, they are evil and will last longer in a landfill than it will take for a Twinkie to mold. We were also concerned about the chemicals and plastics in them, so we looked at various organic and chlorine-free brands. We came home from the hospital with the remainder of a package of Pampers, and we had bought some organic and natural brand diapers before Julia arrived. After trying various brands, here are some initial reactions: The Seventh Generation diapers aren't very soft and don't have very good elastic gathering around the legs (read: more prone to a blow-out than a traditional diaper). The Earth's Best organic diapers, even though I bought the newborn size, do not seem to be small enough, and the tabs practically overlap when I try to close the diaper. The tabs also don't stick very well, and I'm worried about them coming loose and the whole thing falling off. We also tried Huggies organic cotton diapers and didn't like the closure tabs (too small and also didn't hold firmly). Alas, the Pampers, which come in regular and a sensitive skin variety, have thus far emerged as the favorite for this stage. They also have a little stripe that is yellow and turns blue when there is urine. This is great in the very beginning when you come home with baby and are monitoring everything that goes into the diapers very closely.
New-Fangled Cloth and Cloth/disposable hybrid systems
We also looked at various cloth diaper "systems" that include some sort of cover and some sort of new-age organic cotton insert. We may still consider one of these once we get beyond the stage of having 15 dirty diapers per day, but for now, Pampers, with a few natural brands thrown in, have been king. Most of the new-fangled cloth systems come with washable diapers and colorful covers, rather than those awful plastic pants from our childhood. The new generation of covers are convertible and either snap or have elastic band closures (so there are no huge and scary diaper pins!). We looked at some of these systems and were struck by their start-up costs (although they should definitely pay for themselves over time). Also, in an answer to the swishing the poopy diaper around in the toilet, most of these systems come with a flushable liner, so when there IS a poopy diaper, you are able to flush that part down the toilet and just have the wet cloth diaper to contend with. This sounds ok in theory, but I'm wondering if the liners really stay in place and you indeed can easily jettison the #2 material and keep the wet diaper. There is still the issue of storing the wet cloth diapers until it's time to wash, and in that regard, you probably still have to rely on the "wet" pail as the holding pen until it's laundry time. Another nail on the coffin of the cloth diapers was that daycare providers will not use them; they will only use disposables.
So it's hard to have a baby and be a good steward of the environment. We're doing our best, but the diaper issue is one that is difficult to navigate. I wish they made disposable diapers out of those corn-based plastics so that they break down really quickly in a landfill or could be incinerated. I hope we can move to a cloth system in the near future and I will report back on how that goes!
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