Back to normal

At the Denver Aquarium 

I drove Grandma Callis back to the airport this morning so it is time to get back to our normal routine.  How wonderful to have company that you love and can actually enjoy spending two weeks with.  It is sometimes a bumpy path getting back to our normal weekday routine where Joseph is at work and Perrin and I are a twosome with no Grandma to help me out, play with Perrin, and tidy our kitchen secretly when I am not watching (thank you mom!!).  This just illustrates one of the strange things about the daily task of taking care of a baby.  The days are very monotonous, but yet such small experiences you have with your child or things you observe them doing feel huge and hilarious, and you think you will burst for loving them.  But you don't.  What you do is keep feeding them, keep cleaning them, keep putting them to bed everyday.  The way everyday is monotonous, but at the same time so remarkable, confuses my feelings about being a stay-at-home parent.  

With limited ability to be spontaneous, I feel like my world has gotten much smaller since becoming a parent.  This is tolerable however because it has also gotten so much richer.  I am trying to relax more about Perrin's eating/napping/bedtime schedule.  We were spontaneously asked to an early dinner the other night...and, WE WENT!  We didn't get Perrin to bed early like we should have since she missed a nap that day, but we had fun, she had fun, eating bits off people's sandwiches and drinking water from Grandma's straw (hilarious), and we all survived the day.  The problem for me is feeling like no matter what I do for Perrin, I am probably not doing it right.  When we buck the afternoon nap time and go out on errands or to the library (because I have cabin fever!) I feel guilty for not respecting her schedule, but if I turn down everything that comes up because "it's Perrin's nap time," I feel like one of those parents who drowns themselves in their children's lives and ceases to exist for their own sake.  I hope finding the middle ground becomes easier with time...it must, yes?

As for the happenings while Grandma was in town...we went hiking with Perrin in her new backpack, we went to the Denver Aquarium, bowled, and dressed Perrin up in some of Tara and I's old baby dresses that my mom brought to give to me, aaand discovered that Perrin loves bubbles!  I don't know if she had more fun laughing at them fall or if we had more watching her.

 For months now we have been having diaper rash issues with Perrin.  We have tried different creams, oils, stripped diapers, changed diaper detergent, changed diaper wash cycles, tried disposables, and so on.  Her doctor said she just has really sensitive, dry skin.  We haven't nailed it all down perfectly yet, but her butt is looking less angry--which is good because it was seriously having some scary raging days where it just made you sad to see her little bottom.  

Here are the three things that are helping us--I think.  

1. No more coconut oil!  Parents on-line had raved about coconut oil, especially for cloth diapered babies.  We used it for a good while and didn't even consider that something so natural could be bothering her.  But I put the jar away last week and switched to olive oil (moisturizing and safe for cloth diapers).  This seems to be a good thing for her.

2. We stopped using disposable wipes.  I always bought sensitive skin, non-scented wipes, but they still have alcohol in them, plus ingredients that I don't recognize, so that seemed bad.  I got some soft cotton and cut it into squares.  Now when we change her, we spray a mixture of water, olive oil and a bit of tea tree oil on her butt and the cloth wipe, then just toss the wipe in with the dirty diapers to be washed.  This turned out to be much easier than I thought when I heard of folks using cloth wipes.  Secretly I always thought, "Come on! Cloth wipes?  That is overboard!"  But I was wrong.  Simply put, it is easy and cheap!

3. When her bottom is looking red and she is getting itchy from dryness, we are putting oatmeal soak in her bath.  I started out buying the Aveeno oatmeal soak, but it was expensive!  So I looked on-line and you can make your own by literally just finely grinding up oats, period.  Colloidal oatmeal that helps dry skin isn't anything special that you have to buy.  If you have oats, you have colloidal oatmeal--just grind it up to a fine texture and toss it in your bath.

Perrin moment of zen...

                                                                Huh?

Cloth diapering and stubbornnes, related...not necessarily.

Since about 2 months old we have been cloth diapering Perrin. We decided to do it before she was born for a couple of reasons. First, because it saves a lot of money over time, and second, for environmental reasons. When I was pregnant it would come up in conversation with people that we were going to cloth diaper. Almost always, they would give me this sweet pitying look that said, they knew just how that was going to go down.  Then they would go one to tell you of someone they knew who tried cloth diapers for awhile, only to give up--just as I would.

It turns out that we are still using cloth, and it really isn't that hard. Of course, I am not working outside the home, so that does play a role in giving me the time to wash diapers every other day and then stuff them with the inserts at night.  At first I thought I might continue with cloth even if it was a pain out of sheer stubbornness, just because everyone seemed to think I would quit.  I have been pleased to realize that I am not doing it out of stubbornness; I kind of like it. Washing and stuffing the liners back in the clean multicolored shells feels like this comforting ritual; you know, because women are just naturally passionate about cleaning, like in those commercials where it looks like the women wants to make love to her disinfecting counter-top cleanser.  Aaaanyway, the point is, it just isn't as hard or time consuming as you might think.  

Here is a quick little run down of cloth diapering in case you are curious how it works or might want to try it on the tiny butt in your family.  

- First you have to choose which ones you want...this is the hardest part.  There are more brands out there than you can imagine unless you have already waded into that world in the last handful of years.  I did tons of research, but sort of ultimately picked the same ones my brother and sister-in-law were going to use for their daughter who is very close in age to ours.  ...tired of diaper research, they are smart people, lets follow suit...  We are using Bum Genius 4.0, which seems to have been a good choice.  Thank you Jodi and Dan!

  
These close with hook and loop (like Velcro) and have a pocket that an absorbent insert goes into.  Also, the size is adjustable, so you don't have to keep buying new ones as your baby grows, which is good because they cost about $18 for each shell (comes with 2 inserts, one small, one larger). 

Generally cloth diapers need to be changed every two hours during the day, ...then it just depends one how often you plan on washing them in order to decide how many to buy...starting with a supply around 20 worked for us. 

-  I have 1 diaper pail for cloth and one lidded trash bin for used wipes and the occasional disposable diaper.  Plus a small plastic bin on top the table to toss the dirty diaper in until I can spray it off in the toilet or just pull out the liner and shove both parts in the diaper pail.

- I wash diapers every other day.  You have to use cloth diaper safe detergent (as well as diaper rash creams); what makes them safe is that they don't have ingredients that cause the diaper to start repelling urine, mostly animal derived substances, and they rinse completely out without leaving residue that can irritate the baby's bottom.

- You want to use a hot wash cycle to sanitize, and running an extra rinse cycle is a good idea to make sure all the detergent is rinsed out really well.  Then the diaper shells need to air dry, but the inserts can be put in the dryer.

There isn't much else to it.  They have come a long way since the white squares of cloth with pins in the sides that our grandmas remember. 

ZEN MOMENT WITH PERRIN..."Oooooo, tassels."