I read Ingrid Bauer’s wonderful book “Diaper Free” when I was pregnant with my first son, Cedar, and it all made perfect sense to me.
One of my favourite photographs, is of 20-year old me, holding tiny little Cedar at 2 or 3 days old, over a wooden bowl as he is making one of his first lovely, sweet-smelling dandelion-yellow breast-milk poops into the bowl. I wish I could find that picture.
I had a little “poop song” for Cedar, which I would quietly chant in order to gently urge him to eliminate, and I remember carrying the bowl with me while we traveled by ferry and then by bus, from the Sunshine Coast of BC where I lived, to visit my family in Vancouver.
This was during the time that I was wearing linen clothes I had hand-sewn myself as a political statement, and I was ranting about the dangers of plastic long before anyone else had even considered the proposition. Cedar never even *touched* plastic. The prospect of disposable diapers coming anywhere near his pristine skin was unthinkable.
Sigh. Poor little me, so radically ahead of my time.
Anyway. I spent quite a bit of Cedar’s first year covered in poop, but really, poop from nursing babies is quite lovely and innocuous, and it wasn’t until Cedar started eating that I did end up relying a little bit on cloth diapers, until he reached about a year old, and then I helped him learn how to use the toilet, and that was pretty much that.
(In fact, all of my kids have begun learning how to pee and poop in the toilet at one year, and they’re reliably using the toilet at a year and a half.
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I have never toilet-trained my kids. But I have gently helped them figure out how to use the toilet.
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Much more on my ideas about toilet-learning later.)
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I encourage every single parent to read Ingrid Bauer’s book, “Diaper Free”, even if you have no plan to implement elimination communication with your kids. Because what Bauer has to say about parenting, and children, and dignity and respect, is truly radical, and very important.
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And I feel that although I have ended up using cloth diapers with all my kids, I have very much kept the philosophy and spirit of Elimination Communication high on my list, and all of my babies get tons of diaper-free time during the day, and when it’s warm, they’re naked and peeing in the grass. It’s lovely.
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But something happened this past winter that I am not proud of. I had a box of disposable diapers lying around, and somehow we used them, and then somehow we acquired some more, and I was only using them when we went out…And I had what seemed like good excuses! including the fact that we don’t have a washing machine, and I do all of our laundry at a laundromat which is an hour away from our house…
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But it hit me like a ton of bricks one day, that not only was I far from my ideals and my philosophy of life, but that the use of disposable diapers was–as I had felt in the past with all my previous babies–disrespectful, in essence, to Felix.
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I would never have dreamed of using a disposable diaper with Cedar, Kristjan, or Horus or Treva! So I made a decision that I would truly never use another disposable diaper again, and I decided to devise a method for hand-washing Felix’s diapers.
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I also realized that if I were to buy disposable diapers regularly, I would be spending a significant amount of money, obviously, but also time and energy shopping, and then throwing them out.
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The time that it takes to wash diapers, and to rinse them, and to hang them out to dry, and then to fold them, and then to do it all over again…is really a metaphor for the work of caring for our babies. What do I have to do that is more important?
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So after a month or so of using disposable diapers with some regularity, I stopped–despite the winter, despite my exhaustion, despite the laundromat.
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Since then, washing Felix’s diapers has, for me, become a meditation on his fleeting babyhood, and a meditation on his beautiful body, and on the health of his cycles of eating and eliminating, and on just how fortunate I am to be able to care for him.
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When I scrub his poop off the cloth in the toilet, I truly feel so glad to have this opportunity to choose to do this work joyfully, often with Horus and Treva watching and helping, while I teach them that our bodies are really beautiful, and that disgust plays no part in how we live and care for the people we love.
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I really want my children to know that our world is precious, and that in a very concrete way, how we care for our bodies and the bodies of other people, is directly associated with the health of our world.
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Furthermore, the diapers and wooly covers that Felix is wearing now, are *the very same* diapers and covers that Cedar, Kristjan, Horus, and Treva wore. These are beautiful objects. Real family heirlooms.
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Now, when the kids have a twice-or-thrice weekly bath, I wash the diapers by hand in the used bathwater, then I soak them overnight, and then rinse them again in the morning, wring them out, and hang them on the line.
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This has been working beautifully for quite some time now. It is easy, and it is do-able for everyone.
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I would like to invest in a wash-board at some point. But for now, we’re just fine.
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And little Felix is coming up to 10 months old, which will mean that his diaper-wearing days are coming to an end.
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I am honestly so glad I found myself again.
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PS: I have been given a few all-in-one diapers with special velcro and snaps, here and there over the years. I have to say that I don’t use them very often. The very best diapers for me are the very simplest pre-folds. I use prefolds, along with a snappi (google it), and a wool diaper cover. And that’s it. My favourite wool covers are the Aristocrats, and I have 4 pairs which have lasted me through 5 babies, and they’re still going strong. They only need to be hand-washed about once a week, unless they become soiled with poop, in which case I’ll just wash that pair right away. I use Eucalan wool-wash for all my woollens. This is an extremely simple diapering system, and is extremely economical.