No Impact Week Day 1: Consumption

If you are just jumping into Sierra Club No Impact Week posts, please read this one to understand what we are doing.

Today we were supposed to look at our consumption as a family. As in, what do we buy and what do we really need to buy?

For starters, the manual suggests making a list. Well, for us, the only things we really consume, on a weekly and even maybe monthly basis, are food, wipes, cleaning supplies, and disposable diapers (for 8 hours with the babysitter per week). I am serious, too-- we very rarely buy clothes, as in maybe a few things once or less per year if needed to look professional at work. And Christmas (but we are not bonkers in the spending department there either). Our minimal consumption of general consumer goods could be partly due to the fact that we do not have the budget for "things" (hi, student loans), but I think it is simply because we are the type to go hiking or read a favorite book or listen to our favorite music, which are all things we do not need to purchase.

For those of you who do have the spending power, some suggestions for lessening your carbon footprint are using hand-me-downs (We have been so lucky to have been given a lot of hand-me-downs for Gabe, but many community organizations or churches hold clothing and/or toy swaps. Try and find one, bring your old things, and trade for what you need!)

As far as our cleaning products, we still have ample amounts of the eco-friendly cleaners we do use so I will not be making them this week. However, I **will** be making them as an experiment when we do run out, and I will post an addendum to this post at that time.

Another helpful tool from the No Impact Week Manual on finding where to shop for less impactful items? The Green Guide.

---

But let's come back to today and our family...

This week all we needed was our food and baby wipes. We'll be dealing with food on Wednesday so let's focus on the wipes and whether we really needed to purchase them.

Now, when we switched to cloth diapers when Gabriel was 2.5 months old, it did not take long for me to jump into using cloth wipes. I made batches every few days, and we washed them with the rest of his diapers. Up until Gabriel started solids back in May, things were smooth sailing because Gabe's poop was water soluble, and we literally could just throw everything into the diaper pail without a care in the world. We still had disposable wipes in the diaper bag for when Gabriel was with the babysitter, but that was it.

Once the peanut butter poop arrived, so did our return to disposable wipes. At first, we just had a small batch of disposable wipes by the changing table for peanut butter poop only. And then it just became part of our regular rhythm again.

Let me take this moment to say that I had already been planning and meaning to address the disposable wipe issue in our house, but now is a good time to really put them to rest, unless absolutely needed. Why? For one, the peanut butter poop phase really is over at this point. It would be really easy to scuffle into the bathroom and shake off the wipe while I am taking care of emptying his dirty diapers. Secondly, we do not have a diaper genie or anything like that anymore, so it will keep dirty wipes out of our trashcan (And we already know trash is going to be scrutinized tomorrow as part of No Impact Week, so I guess this is a great day to kick wipes out of the picture!).

So let it be known, when considering our weekly consumption, we have kicked disposable wipes to the curb, though we still did purchase them today for the diaper bag to the babysitter.

If you are interested in using cloth wipes, please check out the recipe I posted here on how to make them. I will say that we moved from stacking them in the old wipes container and started just having a pile in a bin with a spray bottle full of the wipe elixir. I am fairly sure that this week I will be keeping a small container of the elixir by the changing table with wipes to dip them in as needed.

Signing off from Day 1 of No Impact Week! Getting eager for tomorrow's focus on TRASH...

Imagine all the diapers...

I've always loved the song "Imagine" - John Lennon, and tonight I am happily imagining a world without the below being buried in our earth. But unfortunately, there are lots of diapers being buried.

Cloth Diapers "In Real Life"

As proud and happy I am to be a Cloth-Diapering Mama, I haven't perfected the art of time and diaper management so that disposables never come out of our home. The above picture is from last weekend-- so, no, we haven't dismantled the Diaper Genie just yet, though it was the first time it was emptied since early February (that sounds gross, but I assure you no scents were permeating from it).

We are planning on taking the DG apart this weekend, though. While we do use a disposable here-and-there-very-rare, at this point we might not fill up a DG again until the end of the year. Not exaggerating. We're getting closer and closer to managing and mastering cloth.

But here are some cases of disposable use for thought.

1. We miscalculated how many diapers we needed while out, and all we have to use is that disposable stuck at the bottom of the diaper bag "just in case." (We've sort of gotten away from this by now-- you get used to using more space in the diaper bag for unused and used diapers).

2. Gabe has a truly bad diaper rash so much so that I am afraid we will destroy the cloth with butt cream/paste/vaseline (This situation has only occurred once, and I recently started lining his diapers with fleece for ultra protection).

3. Somehow all of Gabe's night-friendly diapers are dirty when he is headed to bed (This, too, has only happened once. We finally have the right number of diapers/ I am now good at knowing when diaper laundry needs to be finished so as to avoid this situation again.)

4. Gabe is at the babysitter's while I work. I spend approximately 15 hours away from Gabe due to employment. My Mom watches him during one shift, and she happily uses cloth-- she's a big fan of BG 3.0s, and whenever people make any sort of face or weird comment regarding our cloth choices, she is the first to be ultra supportive of our cloth diapering (Thanks, Mommy.).
...So Gabe spends about 9.75 hours away from family per week. And he heads to the sitter in a pocket diaper, but with his current peanut butter poop/rolling and rocking EVERYWHERE craziness, I really am not comfortable asking the babysitter to keep him in cloth while she cares for him. So he does wear disposables with her... probably about 5 or 6 per week tops. It makes me cringe, but that's just reality of life situations. I can only hope that if and when we are blessed with our next babies that I can be with them pretty much always (in a healthy way) and no disposables will come out of our home.

And for awhile we were still using disposable wipes (which easily slipped into the DG), but we are on a full-time cloth wipe regimen now. We have changed our system just slightly, and I will be posting an update about it soon.

So, lovely readers, what are your cloth diaper pitfall situations? Am I just a fool to have had the issues above? Tell me true!

--
And while we're on the subject, here's another diaper issue at hand.

Overnight Weekend Travel

We are currently brainstorming our cloth diapering tactic for a trip we are taking at the end of May. I will be writing a very nice post about this trip later, but for now, I will just give some basic deets and our "math problem."

-We are leaving here around 12:45 p.m. Friday.
-Including pitstops to nurse and change diapers, it should take us 7-8 hrs to reach our destination.
-We will be staying in a lodge Friday, Saturday, and Sunday evening.
-We will be returning home on Monday morning, again taking a 7-8 hr trip to reach home.

There is no laundry available to us at the lodge that I am interested in doing while on this trip. You'll totally understand why when I elaborate later.

So, what to do?
I'm thinking of doing pockets while driving, the Flip System Covers with Flip Disposable Inserts during the day, and then using pockets at night. I am fairly certain we have enough diapers for this to work. What I'm concerned about?
-We've never used the Flip System Disposable Inserts before. We usually use prefolds under Flip covers.
-We only have 3 Flips covers. We have 3 Econobums covers and 3 Thirsties Duo Wraps. ...So, that is probably enough to get us through, but will Econobums and Duo Wraps work with Flip Disposable Inserts? I don't know.

We will be heading to Vermont on vacation this summer, and we do have access to laundry in the home being rented up there. So, I'm happy to know we won't have to do this sort of hybrid system often.

Please leave comments with suggestions about weekend travel!

Out of the Frying Pan and into the Fire.

After 2 months of cloth diapering, we've taken the dive into cloth wipes tonight.

To start things off, I made
A Very Basic Wipes Solution...
2 c. very warm water
2 tsp. baby wash
1 tsp. olive oil
1 tsp. Burt's Bees Mama Bee Body Oil with Vitamin E

From what I have read, I do want to switch from the Burt's Bees to tea tree oil for its anti-fungal properties, but I didn't have any in the house, and I just wanted to get my feet wet in getting cloth wipes together (we only have 24 for now-- I'll be ordering some more asap so that we use cloth wipes full-time).
Basically, I heated the water in the teapot, poured two cups into a measuring cup, added the rest of the measured ingredients, stirred them up, and poured the solution over the wipes. We let it sit for a few minutes so that the wipes could soak up all the goodness and cool a bit. Honestly, I'm not worried about keeping wipes warm.

How are the wipes set up?
Thanks to The Feminist Breeder and her awesomely-clear method of wipe-folding, they're nestled all snuggly-wuggly in a disposable wipe container so that they pop up just like disposables.
It is fairly simple to set up-- just lay a wipe flat and place another wipe halfway over it.
Then, fold the first wipe over, overlapping half of the second wipe.
Then, add another wipe on top of the fold.
Then, fold the wipe below over, overlapping half of the third wipe.
Etc. Etc. Etc.
Get the Feminist Breeder's awesome step-by-step directions here.

We've done two or three changes with the cloth wipes so far tonight, and we love them. They are gentle on Gabe, and they are easy to use. How wonderful to just plop the wipes into the diaper pail with the dirty diapers!


I'll keep you posted if I have any Eureka moments as we further our journey in cloth wiping.