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!