Monday, January 16, 2012

Men and Cloth Diapering

**Have you entered the Now Family giveaway yet? Do it!!**

The Padded Tush is doing a segment about Convincing Your Man to Use Cloth Diapers, and I thought I would share with all of you our experience with this topic.

It all starts back in April of 2009, I decided that to try to save some money I would use cloth diapers, but I would use a service.

It was horrible. Mostly because of my lack of knowledge, I didn't know anything about covers, which I had to buy my own, and the company recommended Pro-Wraps, the Extra Large left deep welts on my 21-month-old. I knew nothing about wet bags, so I didn't know how to travel with cloth very well. And our pail smelled HORRIBLE. A weeks worth of poopy diapers in a tiny apartment will do that to you. I still am repulsed by the smell of those odor eaters. I also hated having to fish poopy wipes out of the diapers and throwing them away. Garbage can full of poopy wipes? Yuck!

After our 5 week commitment was up, we canceled and went right back to disposables.

Fast forward to November 2010, our second child (Audrey) had been having horrible skin problems, and a constant rash. While my husband was changing her diaper, and applying mass quanities of cream to her bum I innocently suggested cloth diapers as a way to help her bum.

He looked like I'd smashed his toe with a hammer, and broke his favorite toy.
Seriously.

I even started giggling at him, his face was too funny.
But he said through clenched teeth, "If it makes her bum better, I suppose..."

Luckily, I have a good friend who let us borrow some cloth diapers to try and see what we thought of them. So I borrowed 7 Kawaii pocket diapers, and showed Jordan how to use them.

The next day he told me that we must have been cloth diapering Sydney wrong because these weren't that bad.

But there were a few things that Jordan wouldn't do, and a few things that made him more likely to use cloth diapers.

He would not wash the diapers.
If the diapers were not stuffed he wouldn't use them. He'd search for disposables or he'd wake me up and make me assemble a diaper.

I also have my own list of "demands" when it comes to cloth diapering. I refuse to use prefolds or pails after the diaper services, lol.

It's now been a little over a year, and things have slightly changed. He still doesn't wash the diapers (which honestly is fine with me) but he will assemble diapers if they are not prestuffed. He usually grabs the Nana's Bottoms AIOs first, but if they aren't clean he'll stuff his own diapers. Sure, sometimes I change Audrey's diaper to find that he's paired a hemp insert with a Mother Ease insert, and that's it, but it holds the pee all the same, right? :)

I think for my husband, the biggest turning point was when we went on a week long vacation and used disposables, and we were pooped on so many times!! I think it was then that he realized how much he liked the cloth diapers.

When I asked him for his opinion on the matter he replied, "Cloth diapers are not more difficult that disposables, instead of putting the diaper in a Diaper Genie, you put it in a wet bag, which actually is easier, as you don't have to shove it in the pail."

Now Grandmas on the other hand...we might have another segment on them...

How is the man in your life when it comes to cloth diapers? Padded Tush has some great tips for convincing or easing him into it!

1 comment:

  1. I flat out asked my hubby what he thought and he said "for me, it's not hard. For you, it's a lot of work. I'm not going to wash them and match inserts and all that shit."

    He will wash diapers in a pinch. And he'll do flats, prefolds, fitteds and AIO's, but he refuses to match inserts to pockets because we have 20+ pockets, no more than 3 of the same brand. I understand how frustrating that is to someone who doesn't care, and that's fine with me. He could last a day and a half on diapers without having to match anything (we have a lot of diapers). He also would never try to do a nighttime diaper for our 3yo. She's daytime trained (has been for a year) but still needs diapers at night and she's an extremely heavy wetter so I know exactly what works and he won't even try lol.

    As for washing, the man understand the basic cold rinse, hot wash, hot rinse, cold rinse. He's great at rockin' a soak overnight as well. He'd be completely lost if I asked him to strip anything lol.

    And as the grand finale, he's more than happy to deal with poop diapers! Yay! What more can I ask for?!

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