In early 2010, we found out that we were pregnant with our daughter, Isabella. Corry and I had spoken before we got pregnant about how we would be interested in cloth diapering our children. He had been interested in it when his older kids were babies but had never convinced his previous wife to go along with it. I was game so off we went into the black hole of the Internet.
Got a spare 19,000 hours? Try googling cloth diapers. It is straight up the most overwhelming thing that I have ever researched online. What is a Fuzzi Bunz? Who or what makes a Snappi? Do you still need plastic pants over the diapers? Am I going to stab my daughter with one of those over sized safety pins? Warning: brain overload approaching... Lucky for us and millions of other parents, these are not the diaper's from your grandmother's day. Cloth diapering has changed a lot in the last 20 years and is now working it's way into mainstream culture. Gone are the days of the only options being the folded Gerber diapers with HUGE safety pins. Let me stop and say that those pins being called *safe*ty pins is comical because I have used them before and stabbed myself with one. Unsafety pins is definitely more like it.
Now you have SO many more options. Snaps, Velcro, AIO, AI2, fitted, prefolds, microfiber, bamboo... I could look at sites for about an hour at a time before I felt like I had just taken the SATs -my brain hurt so bad! Every time I would google I would see different sites and different information. Some people use different terminology for what I felt was the same item... and there was seriously an entire new language to learn. What about wool? What is an insert? Do I need doublers? How will I know if my child will be a heavy wetter? I have never had so many questions in my entire life about anything...
This is when I started really watching 'mom vlogs' online. I searched on YouTube for cloth diapers and was taken instantly to videos of women explaining the differences and similarities of different brands, types and styles. They talked endlessly about the colors that they liked, brands that they hated, wash routines, and general information about diapers. It was like getting information from your friends but about something useful and not what the neighbor was wearing yesterday while mowing his lawn. Eureka! This was perfect! We were finally starting to make some headway in our research of what we liked and what we felt would work best for our family. Until we started talking to people about it... My mom was skittishly on board. My father actually asked if we were the only people in the world that were going to be using cloth diapers. The rest of my family rolled their eyes and probably talked negatively about it behind our backs I'm sure, but seemed supportive to our faces. My friends were less than helpful and some were downright disgusted. I was sad because this was something that I actually was excited about. I hate when people can't just be fake excited for you. We didn't let it get us down though and we stayed the course...
Next: researching different types of diapers
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