Tao of Poo

Funny thing about having a kid, a job, and another blog: you don't get much time to write (or reflect).

Mr. Whippersnapper is nigh on 14 months now. Much has changed - especially the consistency of his poo - which, now that he is eating more human food, is more like the kind of poo you step in on the sidewalks of NYC than the innocuous cheezy custard of his early months.

Current solution for removing sticky, sat-in poo from a diaper: old rubber spatula in a jar behind the john. Works pretty well. I'm still laundering the same way more or less: less line drying (hard to time everything out with the job and the sunny days). Mobile kids also eat up more time and 14-month-olds are awake a lot more, so that's even more of a jam.

The sticky older baby poo also seems to increase diaper rash problems, which requires the use of more heavy-duty cream - I use A&D Ointment - a combo of lanolin and vaseline, basically - for the base layer, and then a thick paste of off-brand Desitin - essentially 40% strength zinc oxide.

It helps.

I've also virtually eliminated the bowl of warm water at this point. The frequent wetting and rubbing of the bum exacerbated the rash problem. Instead, in the event of a poo, I use off-brand scentless, alcohol-free wipes (note: these say "flushable", but I accidentally put one through the wash, and it came out in perfect condition. Wouldn't flush these if you really care about your plumbing - definitely a no-no if you're on septic).

After the wipes, I smear on gob of A&D which works like a make-up remover and odor-eliminator. I wipe some of that off and then apply the zinc cream. I have to do this pretty much every time because he's a pretty regular kid, and you never know when he'll drop the bomb.

If he pees and things look pretty good, I just reapply some ointment and cream and go with it. That seems to cause less damage than all the cleaning.

The use of the heavier creams has made the laundry a little scummier, which brings me to the title of the post. Rather than subscribing to some formula for getting things clean, listen to your diapers. Watch your washer. They are telling you a story about poo and goo. Go with the flow - use different amounts of soap, switch between hot and cold water if you think it's necessary. Don't wash your wife's pretty things right after the diapers.

If you can, line-dry. It's still the best energy saver and smell-and-stain remover.

May the poo be with you. Always.

g-Wiz

Welcome to month 8!

Catching up on a few things.

Firstly, we have some poops acquiring the consistency of tomato paste. Whippersnapper has been eating "solids" - which are actually purees, plus whatever biscuit bits migrate into his stomach after copious slobbery gnaws. He's mostly breastfed still, but eats this stuff daily. We get poops every 2-4 days.

I throw the poopy pants into the dry diaper bucket and throw everything in the wash - still on cold, still with vinegar, and it comes out fine. I did do a hot wash of a bunch of diapers I suspected of diaper cream buildup, but it was more for psychological reasons than rational ones: the diapers were still performing more or less the same. I've read of "breaking down" the diapers every three months with a hot wash or two - diapers that had become essentially waterproof.

I don't know what those folks are using for diaper cream (axle grease?) but I haven't encountered any pee beading up on the cloth...

Number 2...hahahahaha....

Jocoseriously, I got some gDiapers. We're on the verge of going up a size from the Thirsties Duos Size 1, which work great - but being an epic dabbler, I had to try out the gDiapers.

On the whole, it's a toss up. If you're using Duos and you like them, I can't recommend switching unless you're just dying for a change of scene. On the upside, you don't need as many g covers because they have snap-in "liners" or pockets that actually take the diaper. I have 7 Little gPants and about 15 liners. I bought some extras, and some two-packs of the gPants had an extra pocket/liner each in them.

The gDiaper has a good disposable liner which I can recommend. It's biodegradable, and flushable - if you follow the instructions, and you're not on septic...and if you have relatively modern plumbing. If you're on septic, you'll just fill it up, and if your house is prone to clogs, you'll certainly have trouble flushing these blobbies - but in a new home on sewer, they're fine. You have to break them apart with a little swishy-stick.

I haven't had the opportunity to try out the flushability firsthand - I'm on septic AND I have old plumbing.

The gDiaper disposable liner does seem to cut down generally on waste if you're working back and forth between cloth and disposable. Added benefit: you can preload a snap-in pocket with a disposable liner and take it on the road with you for easy change. Functionally, the benefit over the Duo is that the gPocket thing constrains the diaper on all sides, front and back - the Duo only loads in the front, leaving some creative folding and stuffing to be done while fastening and fending off arms and legs.

The gPants cover has some nice comfort features - wider waistband comfy thigh gussets. They also cleverly fasten around the side toward the back - timely if your tyke is getting grabby with the front-fastening diapers (which is everything else on the market - including all disposables).

The Duo has a narrow elastic waist, and generally tends to bunch down in the front in a way the appears a little uncomfortable. On the upside, the general construction of the Duo seems to breathe better, and we're still using some Thirsties Small covers for nighttime use with a great wad of diaper to keep the butt dry (we've been having rash problems).

The snap-in pocket/liner of the gDiaper is really pretty much plastic as far as I can tell - great for dry outside, but no breathing inside. The Duo is polyester lined with neoprene, so it breathes pretty well and stays dry outside. The gDiaper restricts the diapering function to the "hot zones" and leaves more area not needing absorbency generally open to the world - which is good for those parts.

The gDiaper constitutes a system, including the disposable liner, and a custom cloth liner made of polyfleece and cotton. These are pretty nice, soft on the baby side, but are a little light-weight when it comes to absorbency, and tend to wad (not quite wide enough). I should mention that were using "Medium" gPants and "Medium/Large" liners. The disposable liner looks big enough to size up, but I'm skeptical of the custom cloth liner - it's only just big enough to fill the Medium gPants. I mostly use a folded up cotton prefold that stays in place better and absorbs more than the custom liner. We use custom liners for times in the morning when we know we'll change him again soon - maybe he likes a break with the softer ployfleece.

(Probably it's all in my head - the kid eats carpet and sits in his own excrement without batting an eye. Studies have proven that sad babies don't care if they're wet or dry - they'd rather just be picked up and held.)

The Duos promise to get your kid out of diapers in two sizes - which is a big cost benefit. If you started out with a small kid and end up with a big one, you could be into 4 sizes of gPants. On the other hand, you'll need at least 8, and preferably 10-12 Duos in each size, whereas you could get maybe 6 gPants and 6 extra snap-in pockets in each size of gDiaper.

Laundering is the same for both. I'm curious about how the pockets will hold up after repeated washings, but I imagine they'll do fine. The gPants do take longer to line-dry. They're double-layered poly-cotton. The Duos dry really fast, even indoors - maybe a few hours at most inside and an hour or less outside on the line. The gPants take about as long to dry as a t-shirt.

If you're brand conscious and you want a stylish baby, the gPants clean up. Other than that, it's probably just preference. I would recommend getting a gDiaper rig to try - and if you're a gDiaper user and you need to go up a size, try out a Duo. Go with what you like. I don't know about anything else because I haven't used it. I guess you could pack a paper bag with straw...

Fun Shapes

1.19 x 10^57 atoms pack a lot of cleaning power

Bleach. HA!

Hot water. HA! HA!

Dryer? meh.

Check out the awesome atomic power of our own sun!
This is a cloth cotton diaper stained with poop. I washed it in cold water with 7th Generation liquid and some vinegar. This picture is post-wash just after I hung it up.


Then I hung it in the sun. Not even the direct sun. It was pretty overcast, but bright. Below is the result.


It hung out there for about 5 hours. During that five hours, I did other things while the atomic power of the sun did its thing. It's too bad my cell phone can't record smells because a line dried diaper should have its own cologne. Maybe I'll pitch it to J-Lo.

Save your money, save the planet. Line dry some stuff.

Unctuousness

Isn't that a great word. It means a lot of things, (like insincere) but it also means "oily."

Whippersnapper has developed a stubborn rash, and so we're trying on some different diaper creams. We used to use some olive oil based balm from a great place in the St. Lawrence river valley (which smells great and works very well on garden variety diaper rash. It also came in handy for use on cradle cap, various dry spots, and dad's hands and cuticles).

We used Burt's Bees Diaper Cream and some regular old petroleum jelly. In response to the rash, we've upped the ante, using the goo more liberally, and we also starting using Bordeaux's Butt Paste. I just did a load of diapers after adding to our arsenal, and for the first time, there was an unctuous (but very sincere) ring around the inside of our washer.

It doesn't look too bad, but if it persists, I might have to find a solution. My first response was to get an old rag and wipe away the ring of oily stuff from inside the washer before it got too thick.

I'll post again about whether this becomes a persistent problem and if I discover any cheap, friendly solutions to it.

Also, as soon as I find my adapter, I'm going to post the awesomest before/after photo of a lined dried diaper that will convince you that bleach and heavy detergent is totally useless compared to the awesome atomic power of the Sun.

How do you keep a fish from smelling?

...Cut off its nose...

The offspring will be four months old tomorrow. During his first month, he was very small, and we were a little under-prepped for cloth diapering. We didn't start until he was 1 month old.

In my last post, I exhorted the efficacy of cold-water washing. I remember now, I left out a point - I wash on cold, but I use the "heavy soil" cycle so the diapers really get agitated. (They calm down again before we use them.)

In the last few days, I've noticed the offspring developing a pretty strong urine smell when he pees even a little, and after the last cold/cold wash, I noticed that a general baby-diaper smell was starting to accumulate and not go away so much in the diapers after the wash.

Today, I threw everything in for a hot wash with a tiny amount of Borax to break down some of the odors and stains. I'll see if that doesn't help with the accumulating urine odor. Keep in mind, that this is a single hot wash after three months of use - and all the diapers and butt rags are in there.

If you're trying to save on water or energy, and you mix in a hot wash every now and then, think about other ways to save energy and water:

• Are all your toilets low-flow? If not, a new toilet is only about $100 and very simple to install. If you can change a bike tire and connect a garden hose to a sprinkler, you have the skills to replace your toilet.
• Do you have CFL bulbs in all commonly-used lamps?
• Got night lights? How about LED night lights instead?
• How about a low-flow shower head (appx 1.5 gallons per minute)? Mine has a shot-off valve on the shower head, and I turn it on the get wet and to rinse, and off to lather up. (TMI?) Anyway, it save a lot of water!
  

And so on. I'll let you know if the hot-wash does the trick on the urine smell, or if the kid is just developing an odor internally.

50 Million Tons of Thermoplastic Resin Later...

'How Bad For The Environment Can Throwing Away One Plastic Bottle Be?' 30 Million People Wonder

January 19, 2010 | Issue 46•03

A local resident discards a plastic bottle—just as he has done his whole life—with no perceivable effect on the environment.

WASHINGTON—Wishing to dispose of the empty plastic container, and failing to spot a recycling bin nearby, an estimated 30 million Americans asked themselves Monday how bad throwing away a single bottle of water could really be.

"It's fine, it's fine," thought Maine native Sheila Hodge, echoing the exact sentiments of Chicago-area resident Phillip Ragowski, recent Florida transplant Margaret Lowery, and Kansas City business owner Brian McMillan, as they tossed the polyethylene terephthalate object into an awaiting trash can. "It's just one bottle. And I'm usually pretty good about this sort of thing."

"Not a big deal," continued roughly one-tenth of the nation's population.

According to the inner monologue of millions upon millions of citizens, while not necessarily ideal, throwing away one empty bottle probably wouldn't make that much of a difference, and could even be forgiven, considering how long they had been carrying it around with them, the time that could be saved by just tossing it out right here, and the fact that they had bicycled to work once last July.

In addition, pretty much the entire states of Missouri and New Mexico calmly reassured themselves Monday that they definitely knew better than to do something like this, but admitted that hey, nobody is perfect, and at least they weren't still using those horrible aerosol cans, or just throwing garbage directly on the ground.

All agreed that disposing of what would eventually amount to 50 tons of thermoplastic polymer resin wasn't the end of the world.

"It's not like I don't care, because I do, and most of the time I don't even buy bottled water," thought Missouri school teacher Heather Delamere, the 450,000th caring and progressive individual to have done so that morning, and the 850,000th to have purchased the environmentally damaging vessel due to being thirsty, in a huge rush, and away from home. "It's really not worth beating myself up over."

"What's one little bottle in the grand scheme of things, you know?" added each and every single one of them.

Monday's plastic-bottle-related dilemma wasn't the only environmental quandary facing millions of citizens across the country. An estimated 20 million men and women wondered how wasteful leaving a single lightbulb on all night really was, while more than 40 million Americans asked themselves if anyone would actually notice if they just turned up the heat a few degrees instead of walking all the way downstairs and getting another blanket.

Likewise, had they not been so tired, and busy, and stressed, citizens making up the equivalent of three major metropolitan areas told reporters that they probably wouldn't have driven their minivans down to the corner store.

"Relax," thousands upon thousands of Americans quietly whispered to themselves as they tossed two articles of clothing into an empty washing machine and turned it on. "What are you so worried about?"

Running Hot and Cold

NOTE: At the moment of writing, the little bugger is 100% breastfed, which has a certain mitigating effect on the condition and odor of the waste product.

I did a lot of reading about what would get diapers clean. I read about rinsing in the toilet, I read about a hot rinse in the washer, then a full cycle of hot wash, hot rinse, I read some stuff about vinegar and Borax and other hippie-type cleaning agents.

Here's what I did.

First, I washed with hot, rinsed with hot. I used 7th Generation laundry soap. I read complaints somewhere about residue and reduced absorption, but I haven't seen it. I added 1 cup of vinegar to the wash cycle, and another cup into the fabric softener cup. I read about adding vinegar in the rinse to remove odors, and I was doing that with regular laundry anyway.

I thought what a drag to have to go down there and figure out when it was rinsing, so I studied the mechanism in the softener dispenser and discovered that it only came out during spin cycles, which would work fine.

I also added about 1/4 of Borax to the wash. Borax is bauxite. It's mined. It's not man-made, so the hippies dig it, but it's still not good to eat or put in your eye. Bauxite undergoes a mild reaction in water and generates some H2O2 - hydrogen peroxide - which is a very mild bleaching agent. Bauxite also has a tendency to leave behind some alkaloids in the fabric, which cause rash pretty effectively.

The bauxite, hot water combo makes your diapers pretty stain free - sans chlorine.

I wash the diapers on the "Small" load selection to conserve water.

I dried the diapers on hot. They came out fluffy and soft.

Then I read the British LCA on cloth "nappies" and found that the best way to lower the carbon footprint of your diapers was to hang them dry. Now I do that. They're a little crunchy, but nobody minds.

Then I started washing the diapers in hot and rinsing them in cold. I cut down on the amount of Borax to ease the rash. They still came out really clean and smelled pretty good.

I also tried reducing the wash load to "Extra Small" - but that wasn't enough rinse water to get the soap out of the diapers. Back to "Small."

I then tried cold wash cold rinse. Got rid of the Borax (still with the rash). Now the diapers have noticeably dark stains and a very subtle, but not unpleasant, odor when they come out of the wash. By the time they're dry, the odor is gone and they smell pretty much like nothing.

I don't rinse them at all before putting them in the wash. This may change when we introduce some solids. I'm looking forward to better weather, when the UV rays can bleach and odor-eliminate for me. I hear that works quite well.