Cloth diapering: the final smackdown

So, after a hiatus of not dealing with the bumgenius, I finally manned up and scrubbed the specially purchased, non-biodigradable Dawn into our diapers like some kind of demented Cinderella with a little brush. ALL of them. It took a while, and I have blisters and scrapes on my hand, and also wrecked my manicure. Stephanie then rinsed the diapers by hand a few times in the bathtub, because they were saturated with detergent, and then for about 8 cycles in the washing machine to finish rinsing. Then we bleached them, which additionally helps to strip any remaining detergent residue... this in spite of the fact that we'd been using a recommended detergent all along. A hot wash without any detergent and lots more rinsing to make sure the bleach totally got out.

This was everything that the very nice people at the Diaper Lab had to suggest in terms of stripping. (Vastly more helpful than Jillian's Drawers, where we purchased these: they pretty much suggested the next step had be to buy a special detergent from them to try to strip additionally, with expensive shipping.)

In addition to the above steps to try to remove any and all residue that might explain the pee deflection out of the diaper rather than absorbing into the insert, the nice lady at Diaper Lab had a lot of other helpful things to say about why the diapers might not be working for us. Their verdict was that if we've tried ultra-double-stripping the diapers and they still leak, Jolyon may just pee too forcefully for pocket diapers. We have consistently had issues with the inserts not being saturated, but the diapers leaking when Jolyon pees, in spite of not being even remotely 'full': an issue with the velocity of the peeing, rather than the volume.

Additionally, she pointed out that the fit of an one-size diaper will never be quite as good as the fit of a sized diaper (that you have to buy many versions of, thus eliminating the cost-effectiveness), and this might be contributing to the problems. However, it's not that likely given that we appear to be getting the diapers on snugly and securely, and other pocket diapers we have tried are also leaking in the same way.

So, the consensus of our phone conversation was that if the diapers continue not to work even after stripping, then it's not a problem with residue buildup, but a mismatch between the style of diapers and our son's directional, forceful high-volume peeing, as well as possibly his shape. These things can't be fixed by us, and suggest that we are not likely to have luck with cloth diapering our son, at least not with pocket diapers. Note also, all the other types were ones we tried in our sampler, and also not working well enough to be satisfactory for us, I think because Jolyon is a heavy wetter as well as a high velocity one.

So, post-troubleshooting, we gave the diapers one more try. We had a few successful pee-soaked-but-not-leaking diapers, and we did a disposable overnight, since that had been the biggest danger zone. However, today, we had another leaking diaper that was not at all saturated with pee, that leaked spectacularly out the upper left-hand back, i.e. just about as far as it's possible to be away from his peeing apparatus and still be a place on the diaper. Again, minutes after I'd changed him, so no possibility that this was drool or milk or spilled water.

Stephanie said, "OK, that's it!" and looked very cross.

When I asked her if she had anything to contribute to this blog post she said, "I am so done."

And, she's right. We gave it a shot, and tried all of the different kinds of cloth diapers, as well as different styles of the kind that worked best, and really, we are not getting the sort of performance that we had envisioned from them. I asked Stephanie if she wanted to try getting more of the the Blueberry super-expensive diaper (that has had better performance than the Bumgenius, Happy Heiny and Fuzzibuns, possibly due to small sample statistics) and she glowered, and said, "No."

So, yeah, we are officially no longer a cloth diapering family. We will console ourselves with the fact that we are going to be conserving a lot more water, both in washing diapers, and in washing clothing and bedding and anything our son happens to lay down on... and possibly reducing our carbon footprint. Also, in the non-inconsequential fact that even the cheapest generic disposables really do contain our son's peeing magnificently well.

This may represent the final crown jewel in our tiara of crunchy/hippy/attachment parenting failure... but seriously, we have to do what works for us and our baby, and this was NOT working for anyone.

Stress levels had way reduced when we switched to disposables full-time while I was procrastinating scrubbing the diapers: seriously, it is so great to just put Jolyon down on the rug or our bed without having to worry about making sure there's a towel or two under him.