To the mountains!

We're off to Virginia tomorrow afternoon for a weekend with family in Shenandoah National Park. I'm sure I'll have a myriad of posts Monday onward regarding our travels.

In any case, we are driving southbound in the Memorial Day traffic mayhem, and what I''m worried about more than traffic is how our Goober is going to handle a six hour roadtrip.

We've got books, we've got toys, we've got music, and we've got our good looks (snicker), but regardless, we're heading up, up, up in elevation. Even an amused baby boy can have a hard time adjusting to the ear-popping changes.

One way to help with changing elevation? Nurse or feed your baby as you rise. Nursing works in air travel, but obviously, that's not safe or legal in a car. If in a car, you can use a bottle. The suction should help level things out for the baby.

I'm packing a bottle with us for the trip to the mountains. I'll let you know if we need it and/or if it works in soothing Gabriel during the transition!

Bon Voyage to our little family. I'll be back Monday!

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!