A has been in dis­pos­able dia­pers for a day now, and his rash is com­pletely gone. I’m sad that we can’t use our fun, cute, nice dia­pers for him. I guess now I’m look­ing for some new rea­son­ably priced non-suedecloth dia­pers for him. Darn!

We have been cloth dia­per­ing K and A for a while now. A has worn mostly cloth since he came home from the hos­pi­tal, and K has been in cloth since May. When A was very small, he had Kissaluv dia­pers with (mostly) Thirsties cov­ers. K has always worn Bum Genius One Size diapers.

Once A got to be about 12 or 13 pounds, we moved him into the Bum Genius dia­pers, too. It was won­der­fully con­ve­nient. They both wore the same dia­per. We sep­a­rated them by color. K wore all blue dia­pers, and A wore the green and yel­low. This helped us avoid hav­ing to snap and unsnap the dia­pers to resize them over and over. Another ben­e­fit of the dia­pers is that they fit babies from 10 pounds to 35 pounds. We bought enough for our boys, and at that point, we we were done buy­ing dia­pers for­ever! Per­fect, right?

Unfor­tu­nately, no. Some time after A started wear­ing the Bum Genius dia­pers, he started get­ting a con­tact rash on his tummy and around his legs. So, for about a month now, I’ve been try­ing to fig­ure out what could be caus­ing the rash. Is it too much deter­gent? Not enough deter­gent? Is there not enough absorp­tion in the insert? Am I chang­ing him often enough? I’ve got­ten nowhere. I am hav­ing to admit to myself that it is pos­si­ble that he is sen­si­tive to the suede­cloth that lines the diapers.

Both Jason and I are frus­trated with this con­clu­sion. Unfor­tu­nately for us, the Bum Genius dia­pers are pretty expen­sive, and we have quite a few of them. It’s look­ing like we are going to have to either keep them for later and hope that A is less sen­si­tive at that point or buy new dia­pers. At this point, going back to dis­pos­ables is not an option that we are inter­ested in. There are so many ben­e­fits to using cloth dia­pers, and we like the dia­pers, so it’s hard to con­sider a return to disposables.

It may not seem like it, but I am still around. I think about blog­ging at least once a day. I think about top­ics for blog­ging quite often. I just seem to be miss­ing the step in the process where I sit down and write out my thoughts.

Some of you may know that we now have baby #2 in our fam­ily. I had a baby boy July 15th, and I’m now a tan­dem, extended nurs­ing mom. Both boys are still going strong breast­feed­ing. K, my 23 month old nurses about 6 times a day, and A, my 11 week old nurses about every 2 to 2.5 hours dur­ing the day and every 4 hours at night so about 10 times a day. Wow, that sounds like a lot when I say it that way. It really doesn’t seem like that much, but I sup­pose 16+ nurs­ing ses­sions a day is quite a bit.

Now that I’ve taken the time to sit down and start blog­ging, I have about 10 top­ics run­ning through my head. Instead of squeez­ing them all into one humon­gous post, I’ll just let you know what will be com­ing on my blog in the next few days and weeks. My (40 minute) birth story, tan­dem nurs­ing, extended nurs­ing, deal­ing with a tod­dler and an infant, cloth dia­per­ing, dairy sen­si­tiv­i­ties, and over­ac­tive let­down and over supply.

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!