Disposables

Well, after nearly thirteen months of life, my son has worn his first disposable diaper. The hospital where he was born uses cloth diapers and we brought cloth diapers with us to take him home in. And on every trip we've ever taken (though only a few long ones), we've always brought our cloth diapers and detergent and washed the laundry at our family's house, or just dragged them home with us. I had decided after our first camping trip at the end of last month that we would be using disposables for our family vacation later this summer. The campground we were at did not have flush toilets and Simon decided to poop, like, 4 times a day (a change from his usual once or twice) the entire weekend. It was really gross. The dirty diaper bag stunk to high heaven. I was sure I could smell it from the trunk the whole trip home.

So I bought a bag of disposable diapers when they came on sale the other week.

However, I didn't get to wait until the trip to use them on him. He's recently been waking up with a very red "area," with what resembled a burn. I'm guessing it was ammonia burn, which after doing a little bit of research, I figured there must be some lingering bacteria in the diapers which are causing the smell and the burn. Since I hadn't figured out what to do to fix it, I asked Dan to put him in a sposie* at bedtime. Since then, the problem has seemed to clear up a lot, which makes me feel better, though it really kills me to use disposables on him after all I have done to learn everything I can about cloth diapering and all the money we have spent on good cloth diapers and wool covers. I am going to continue to work on the diaper issue to see what I can figure out. I just wish my son's bottom didn't have to be my science lab.

*sposie: cloth diaper-ers endearing term for a disposable diaper