I know that I have had sev­eral expe­ri­ences in dif­fer­ent restau­rants and stores that made me won­der, but I’m here to tell you that good (even great) cus­tomer ser­vice still exists!

One place you can find it is at Cot­ton­ba­bies. I have been buy­ing my cloth dia­pers from them. Last week, they had a sale and I bought 5 dia­pers. When I received them, I was get­ting them ready for the wash and I noticed that a large part of the seam around the elas­tic on the leg hole was com­ing out on one diaper.

I wrote an e-mail to their cus­tomer ser­vice depart­ment on Mon­day evening (after hours) explain­ing my prob­lem and ask­ing what I should do. Well, yes­ter­day (Thurs­day), I received a phone call from Dee, I believe but I’m not sure on the name, at Cot­ton­ba­bies. She asked me a few ques­tions about my dia­per and the prob­lem with it. She then told me they’d mail me out a replace­ment as soon as pos­si­ble. Thanks, Cottonbabies!

A while ago I real­ized that so many times when we have a bad cus­tomer ser­vice expe­ri­ence, we tell every­one that we know about it. Unfor­tu­nately, this doesn’t hap­pen nearly as often when peo­ple have good expe­ri­ences. I just wanted to spread the word that I had a great cus­tomer ser­vice expe­ri­ence, and I am plan­ning on buy­ing more dia­pers from Cot­ton­ba­bies, because I know I can trust their ser­vice and their products.

When I was preg­nant with my son, I had read a few par­ent­ing books in my plan­ning for life with baby. I read both On Becom­ing Baby­wise and Secrets of the Baby Whis­perer. I had it all planned. My son was going to be born and go directly onto a sched­ule which included him learn­ing to sleep through the night by 8 weeks if not sooner. Sounds great, right? Well, the minute he was born, my heart changed. I threw those books out the win­dow and became what some peo­ple call an attach­ment par­ent. I quickly real­ized that I didn’t want my son to cry with­out me or my hus­band calm­ing and sooth­ing him. I wanted to breast­feed for as long as it worked for both of us. I wanted to wear him in a baby car­rier. I became what is also lov­ingly referred to as a “crunchy” parent.

To find other moms who had sim­i­lar par­ent­ing philoso­phies to me, I sought out the Attach­ment Par­ent­ing mes­sage board at Baby­zone. Since I was already active on their mes­sage boards, I started look­ing there for sup­port in my new­found phi­los­o­phy. That was eigh­teen months ago, and since then, I’ve come to believe even more so in our choices to be “attach­ment parents.”

The other moms on this board did things I didn’t know peo­ple still did. They made their own baby food and they cloth dia­pered! When I first heard that, I thought that maybe they were crazy. Then, I started look­ing into cloth dia­per­ing, and I talked to my hus­band about it. He was a lit­tle skep­ti­cal at first, but when I showed him the dia­pers that I wanted to try, he become more and more interested.

Now, instead of using a sim­ple piece of cloth with pin and a cover, cloth dia­pers have become more and more sophis­ti­cated. Now, there are many choices. There are pre­folds, pocket dia­pers, and all-in-ones to name a few. The dia­pers that we researched and even­tu­ally pur­chased are the Bum Genius 2.0 One Size dia­pers. The appeal of these over the oth­ers was that once the new baby reaches 10–12 pounds, we will be able to cloth dia­per both of our chil­dren in the same dia­pers with­out hav­ing to buy new sizes from about 10 pounds until 35 pounds. Hope­fully, by 35 pounds our older one will be potty training.

Yes, now not only am I an extended nurser who advo­cates nat­ural child­birth, I’m also a cloth dia­perer! The next thing I want to try is can­vas shop­ping bags instead of using the store’s paper or plas­tic bags. Wish me luck!

Since I have been about 20 weeks preg­nant, I could tell that my milk sup­ply has been dip­ping more and more. My lit­tle milk man was still deter­mined to con­tinue nurs­ing though. He nursed sev­eral times a day at that point. Steadily, though, he has decreased his nurs­ing over the past weeks until he was down to one or two times a day pretty con­sis­tently. Well, the week­end of May 12 and 13, my fam­ily was in town, and with all the com­mo­tion of hav­ing them here, my lit­tle milk man seemed to for­get about nurs­ing. May 14th was the first day in his life that he went an entire day with­out nurs­ing. He did nurse the next day though, so I thought maybe he would slowly cut out that last session.

Well, this week, he went from Sun­day, May 20th until today with­out nurs­ing. Imag­ine my sur­prise when this morn­ing after I got him from his crib, the first thing he did was look at me and do the milk sign!

So, when do I say he offi­cially weaned? I have no idea, but I do know that I will let him nurse as long as he keeps ask­ing. Just for my own pur­poses, I would love it if he could make it until June 3rd, so I can say that he nursed for 19 months. I do know now that each time he nurses, I try to remem­ber every minute of it. I real­ize that each time that could be the last time we ever do that, and I won’t know it at the time. I’ll only be able to look back and real­ize it later.