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Family life

Cloth-diaper fatigue

After 18 months of cloth diapering and no end in sight, this Today’s Parent blogger is ready to cash in her stash.

By Jennifer Pinarski
Cloth-diaper fatigue

I've given myself permission to take a break from cloth diapering, even if my daughter is adorable with a fluffy bum

When Gillian was 2 months old, I switched from disposable to cloth diapers, surprising all of my friends and especially Mr. P (who detests cloth diapering — but that’s a post for another day). Armed with $300 of beautiful rose coloured bumGenius 3.0s, I started cloth diapering 100% of the time with a vision of saving money, improving the health of our children and reducing our environmental footprint.
For the first few months, cloth diapering was a breeze. Breast milk poop rinsed easily.  Her pee didn’t smell. Even with the dreadful amount of laundry that a newborn produces, it really didn’t seem like that much work. When I hit bumps along the way — the first solids, installing a diaper sprayer, the very hard water at the farm that stained my covers, battling ammonia stink — I pushed through it and kept on using cloth.
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Looking back, it was definitely the honeymoon period of cloth diapering, because now I am so, so tired of it. I confessed my cloth-diaper fatigue to mom friend Andria B (who also cloth diapers and runs a diaper service) and she told me that it was perfectly normal. Many families aren’t as hardcore cloth as I am, so it takes them a little longer to burn out. But they do. Which is why having cloth diaper veterans like Andria in my circle of friends is so awesome (she helped me get through my iron and ammonia problems too). I was thinking about a) ditching cloth for disposables or b) picking up new covers and inserts to revitalize my stash. Andria's advice: slog through it and don't buy more gear. Potty training — even though it seems forever away — is probably no more than six months away. And like every stage of parenting it won't last forever — OK, neverending laundry might. So I've decided to give myself permission to use disposables from time to time. By committing to cloth for this long I know I've achieved all my goals.
Do you cloth diaper? If so, do you ever suffer from cloth-diaper fatigue too?
This article was originally published on Nov 09, 2011

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