One Small Change: cloth diapers

Since this is a brand new blog and my first ever blog post I thought I would introduce myself and my family to you all. My name is Rose and I am married to Joe and we have two daughters, Clara, 41/2 and Iris, 19mos. We live in Spokane, WA where Joe and I both grew up. I stay at home with our girls and intend to home school (unschool, specifically) both of them as they grow. We have been moving towards a more natural way of living since becoming parents, but we have a long way to go to get to the place where we feel our lifestyle truly reflects our values. We are excited to participate in this challenge mostly for the opportunity to go on record with our intentions and make ourselves accountable to the people we know and the people we will meet along the way.

Our first change will be to use cloth diapers exclusively. While pregnant with Clara I discovered Mothering magazine which exposed us to a way of living we had never heard of before. As a result we changed a lot about our lifestyle. We ended up having a home birth, co-sleeping, breastfeeding for years instead of weeks or months. We switched to natural cleaning products and organic food. The one thing we never did was use cloth diapers with Clara. We used chlorine-free disposable diapers which made us feel a little better, but they were still disposable and that always bothered me. I guess with all the other changes we had made in our lives there wasn't room for one more. When Iris was born we continued to use disposables until a couple dozen second hand kissaluvs found their way into our lives. We used those happily until Iris grew out of them and then we fell back into the well worn groove of disposables yet again. Considering that Iris is a toddler already ( how does that happen so fast?) and we don't intend to have anymore children, we don't want to invest a lot in a fancy cloth diapering system. So, I am going to make prefolds using some old baby blankets and sheets we have around the house. I think the covers we used before will still fit and if not I will attempt to make some wool covers using old sweaters. I just learned to sew a few months ago so the idea of making covers is intimidating, but I will give it a whirl and see what happens. I had intended to have the diapers made already, but a bout with the stomach flu set my plans off a bit. So, I will get to work and hopefully have some pictures to post by the end of the weekend.