A madly successful event

Yesterday was the cloth diapering party that was put together by another cloth diapering mom, and me. We ended up in the end with three cloth diapering moms (one of whom makes and sells diapers, too!) and close to 20 newbies. The turn-out was unbelievable, and so was the outcome.

I mostly ended up sitting on the floor, and teaching people how to use prefolds. I brought a stuffed animal frog to be the diaper model, and everyone diapered the frog at least one or two times, and mastered at least one way of folding prefolds. They all also got to see, hold, and figure out many kinds of covers, and sort of see what style they like, and how they may want to get started. They got to see pocket diapers, fitteds, and all-in-ones, in various brands, and see what they like best. Most of them went home and ordered diapers. The rest will do it next payday.

The best of all was this one girl whose husband told her absolutely no cloth diapers on his babies. She really wanted to do it, though, so she came to the party, and had him come by to pick her up at the end. She brought him in so me and my friend S (whose house the party was at) could talk to him about it. I asked him what the issue was, what was holding him back from liking this idea. He said it was the start-up cost. (This is understandable. This guy is a PFC with his second baby on the way.) I told him that the way I swallowed the financial pill myself two years ago when I was starting out, was to figure out how much money I would spend on cloth diapers. Then figure out how many disposables that would buy, and how long that many disposables would last. Then commit to trying cloth diapering for that long. If I hated it and quit at the end of that, I would lose nothing, but if I liked it and kept with it after that, I would save a ton of money from that point forward. That made sense to him, and his wife has placed her first cloth diaper order as of this morning.

Another resistant dad got on board bigger than anything when I told the story of a Marine I know whose wife has cloth diapered their two kids, and saved him enough money by doing that, to pay for a BIG flat screen TV that he watches football on every single weekend. (It's true. Honestly, even if you only cloth diaper one baby, you will save as much money as a very high quality flat screen TV costs.)

It's all kind of cool, really. When the party was over, and two friends and I were sitting there thinking about what had just happened, S said, "You know, I think we've just made a huge step in the direction of changing the culture of this post." We agreed. We did do that. When I first got here almost two years ago, nobody cloth diapered but me. Seeing Orren's cloth diapers is what got S interested. Then she had a baby six months ago, and has cloth diapered her. She had the idea that if people know about it, they'll love it, so we started just bringing it up in conversation in mixed groups a few months ago, just to see if we could get some interest going. As it turned out, we did! Then we had this party to answer questions, further educate people about the various options they have, and to help people figure it out. We did that, and now, if you go to the PX playground any given day, you might just see one or more baby in cloth.

We also thought up some interesting numbers for yesterday:

If the moms at the party cloth diaper 1.5 babies on average (some are on their last baby, many are not), then we will have kept 27 tons of waste out of the landfill.

Assuming the same number of babies as above, 11,556 gallons of crude oil will be conserved in manufacturing alone. (Each disposable diaper uses 3/4 cup of crude oil just to make the materials for it.) This does not even take into account how much oil will be conserved since each cloth diaper is shipped to its owner ONCE then used hundreds of times, vs each disposable diaper being shipped to the store, then used once and thrown away. We're talking MILLIONS of gallons of oil that are now not going to be used, and that's assuming 27 cloth diapered babies (reasonable considering we had 18 guests, and at least half of us will cloth diaper two or more babies).

If all 18 cloth diaper, the money spent for all, will be equivalent of the cost to disposable diaper 2.5 babies.



Yesterday, what we did looked like a fun party, with food, and friends, and lots of laughing and fun. It was all of those things. It was also important. Every person who showed up will make a huge difference. Together, we've truly embodied what our General says about "being Army Green", and guarding our environmental resources.