The Ick factor

When I first heard of using "family cloth". I have to say it turned my stomach, I was not one to touch icky things. The thought of cloth diapering was foreign and all I could think of was the dunking of the diapers that I remembered as a child. Smelly bathrooms also came to mind. Like I mentioned before though, I was broke! I knew it was either potty train at 2 months or take the free diapers. So my friend suggested that we install a kitchen sprayer to our toilet. Then I could just spray off the poo and drop it in the diaper pail, that worked. Actually it worked wonderfully! I never had to touch a yucky diaper. The next thing I wondered was about sanitation. Was this going to spread disease. I looked online and found that as long as you keep them contained in a lidded trash pail it would be alright. ALthough, sometimes in the summer we get flys in the house with the kids coming in and out all the time and I was worried about maggots, but I have been using them for 5 years now and never once have I had one. After I adjusted to the diapers I went to visit a Friend who used cloth for her toilet paper. I had been having issues with my septic being clogged with all the toilet paper that my then very young children were dumping in at a rapid rate. While I was staying for the week with my friend, I found that her bathrooms weren't smelly and she didn't have sanitation issues and I thought maybe I would try them, just to see. So we bought 3 yards of flannel in cute prints and made about 50. I thought I would break myself in by just using them for the baby, then when I dropped in the diaper I didn't have the wipes left to put in the trash. This was a great thing, because I had to use a whole other trash can to dump these in and it did get smelly, (granted I couldn't smell them until I dumped them because I had one of those diaper geineys) because there just wasn't enough of them all at once to merrit taking it out every day. Anyway, I made a wipe solution out of 8 oz. of water, a tbsp of vinegar and some tea tree EO. Then I would spray the baby's bottom and just wipe and drop in the bucket. She never once had a rash. As my confidence grew, I started making some cloth washies for the kid's use. I put a bottle of wipe solution on the back of the toilet and a stack of washies, instructed them in their use and stepped back to see what would happen. They reported to never having had a clean butt before the washies. They were thrilled, not to mention so was I, because now we didn't have to buy exorbitant amounts of toilet paper, or pump the toilet to unclog it. This saved about $5 a week alone! Well, my husband still said he absolutely was not going to ever use them, but never say "never". The day came when I hadn't made it to the store and he needed toilet paper. I grabbed the washies and the solution and put it behind the toilet. He never said anything, but we never went back to paper. I now have about 450 washies and 30 bamboo terry kitchen wipes and 25 muslin facial tissues for noses and such. Every year I make about 50 more wipes and I love the freedom of not having to run to the store or for putting stuff into my septic, which I must mention when we had it pumped 2 years ago it was full to the brim with toilet paper and tampons. And remember I haven't used these things in 5 years! SO this stuff is piling up underground! I also use cloth pads for my period and just spray them with hydrogen peroxide and vinegar with tea tree oil before dropping them in the bucket and they are never stained or smelly. I launder all this stuff about every 2 days using soap nut solution with lavender and tea tree EO, a scoop of borax and a 1/4 cup of vinegar, then spray out the bucket with homemade cleaning spray. They have never smelled and never been stained. I have a front loader HE washer, but when I didn't I would just run a rinse cycle first with cold water and the vinegar and tea tree, then would run my regular wash with detergent on HOT. We have saved so much money on this, I even factored in the water and electricity costs and we still came out on top. I don't honestly know if you would if you didn't have four kids using all the toilet paper to get their poor little butts clean, but if you are on a septic system ,it sure is helpful. I am not sure what they do with it all in the city, probably incinerate it or something, but is that good for us to breath? As for diapering in cloth, I am one hundred percent sure that the land fills are overflowing with them, they don't break down and they are actually toxic if left there. But what to do about it? If you burn them the toxic gas let off into the air has been know to cause cancer and not to mention that horrid smell, so they just pile up year after year. And of course there is the money spent on diapers. At $10-$20 per week for 52 weeks a year and about 3 to four years, well you so the math. If you had 12 diapers, which is actually a lot, you would spend about $120 for your start-up and then with all the new stuff the cloth diaper gurus are coming out with you could manage to only spend that twice, for newborn/sm and then med/larges. Then purchase 3 pullups for $30. You are spending less in their whole diapering lives then you would on your first year of disposables. That is not including the cost of all those non-flushable wipes! Out of all my kid's, my cloth diapered one was the only one to never have a rash. I felt kinda bad about it for awhile,the rest of them having to suffer and all, until I realized that that is what learning sometimes entails. I didn't know any better and now I do. If I had known what I do now, when I first started out as a wife and mother, I am sure we would've saved ourselves a lot of heartache and the land fills a lot of trash, but as I figure it now...We are only held responsible for what we know, and knowledge is power. Now I know and so do you! God once told his people through Hosea "my people perish for lack of knowledge". He must have known a thing or two....Now I am helping out our earth and my fellow man. Sometimes our ick factor and our American snobbery can rob us of the opportunity to try something new, and let me tell you I was a snob like all the rest. But regardless of whether you ever try family cloth, at least try something new as soon as possible, you just might be surprised what you will do!