No really...I :love: them.

How many people HONESTLY can admit (or even considered the possibility of) loving your diapers? :sheepishly raises hand: I do! I love diapers, well :my: diapers. I have been using cloth diapers EVERY day since November 28th, 2005. Since Jacob was 10 days old (and the lapse is only because he was premature and in the NICU.) he has been in cloth dipes, (except for a stint at a daycare who refused to use cloth diapers out of ignorance) and Leah has only used cloth.

There has not been a single day in the last 1, 330 days that I haven't pulled a diaper out of my stash and pinned, snappied, snapped it onto one of my kiddos. I talk about my diapers ALL the time. I personally know of 5 other Mama's who now use cloth diapers because I have talked their ear off long enough and they finally caved in. My newborn diaper stash is now headed to the 4th baby for a new mama to try out cloth (so far every mama who has tried my dipes has ended up buying their own!)

My cloth diaper journey began well before I was a mother. I knew I wanted to use cloth. The main reason I do is because I cannot stand the smell of a disposable diaper...much less the smell of a used disposable diaper. Then in doing the research, and learning what happens to the diapers...I just couldn't stand it. I can smell a wet/dirty disposable diaper from across the room. I felt like putting the money into the disposable diapers was just like throwing the money away. I began researching and many of my teacher friends insisted I wouldn't like using cloth. I couldn't handle being a working single mama (and I never really was a :single: mama, Adam has ALWAYS been a help and support even before we were officially :together:) and take care of cloth diapers.

So one of my dearest teacher friends gave me a wonderful gift. She paid for six months of diaper service. Each Tuesday a bag full of clean fresh dipes showed up on my door and I'd leave the bag of dirty dipes. Jacob was born premature and was in the NICU so he started out for his first week in disposables. But once we settled in at home we had the diaper service and it was wonderful...until we left for vacation on a Sunday night. We had a BUNCH of dirty diapers and had to decide what were we going to do. Our options were 1) use disposables for the trip 2) wash the DS dipes and use them for our trip (it was recommended by the service not to wash their dipes) 3) buy our own diapers for the trip and use them.

We deliberated for nearly a month before we opted for choice 3 and we bought a bunch of DSQ prefolds because that was what we were used to. We'd had no problems with them and saw no reason to find a new system that worked. We cancelled our service because after we successfully vacationed once with cloth we didn't see why we couldn't just wash our own diapers from then on out. We added a bunch of kissaluv fitted diapers to our stash and tried out a few other options. Always going back to either the fitted or the prefold, we narrowed our stash back down to the basics, and we have every day since Jacob was a week old pulled diaper after diaper out of stash, using it and tossing it into our dirty bag. And that is exactly what we have done...until now. :sniffsniff:

Leah is 16 months old. She is waking up dry :every single night: She is waking up dry :every single nap: She has even started taking herself to the potty. She still has a hard time making it to the potty for other people, but with me, we are there. She tells us even in the car when she needs to go to the bathroom and then she waits (several miles at times) until we can find a suitable place to stop. She is transitioning now to full time training pants. We are officially packing up the diapers and listening to Leah when she says "Bopppy! (potty) and "I peeeee" and "Poo poo" She's got this thing down. (We on the other hand are still learning to listen to her :whistles innocently: I'd say 90% of her misses is because we didn't listen) She has even begun taking herself when Jacob is already in the potty and plopping herself down on her potty and they chatter away together at a little potty party. She's been pooping on the potty regularly since she was about six months old.

We kept waiting with Jacob. We were about to move, and then move again six months later when he got to the same point Leah is at. We kept expecting a regression. Then his baby sister was born, again expecting a regression. Then when Leah was just a few months old we went to Disneyland, Jacob still wearing diapers but been telling us FOREVER he was done with them (we just didn't listen) on the way home from Disney, Adam and I realized that Jacob was in the SAME dry diaper. He had told us every time he needed to potty, ALL day long at Disneyland. We went out the next day and bought him his unders and he didn't even need the trainers.

Really, can you imagine loving your diapers so much that you actually feel a little sadness mixed in with the elation as you launder them for the last time and pack them away for the next baby at some undetermined time in the future? I am overjoyed and elated today as I find all the size 2 diapers and put them through the laundry. Tomorrow I'll hang them all out in the sun for them to soak up the sunshine one last time before I box them up. It will be years before they will come out again. I am also really sad that Leah isn't going to have the big cloth butt anymore and that this transition continues the growing up that she seems in such the hurry to do. I'm sad that I'm no longer (for now) a cloth diaper mama. (Not so sad to ditch the diaper bag). I am so proud of my little girl and am just excited to see what new and exciting thing she is going to accomplish next. I'm gonna miss my diapers though...maybe it's time to start thinking about a new baby to wear my stash ;)