What's IN that?

In the wake of the Pampers Dry Max product introduction, many babies developed severe diaper rashes and chemical burns due to whatever the corporate giant Proctor and Gamble put into the toxic soup contained in their diapers. That alone is bad enough, but what makes this really heinous is the way P&G handled this. They could have said, "It was an oversight on our part. We'll be conducting a voluntary recall and refunding the money of customers who reported adverse health consequences." and that would have been that. Instead, they responded by insisting that their product was outstanding, and lashing out at the cloth diapering community, insisting that we are putting our children at greater risk, and taking a greater toll on the planet than they are. You must be kidding me.

In response to that, cloth diapering netizens all over the US will be blogging all week long about the benefits of cloth diapering, and getting the FACTS out there about this. Knowledge and facts trump corporate lies any day, and any intelligent person knows that.

Let's start with an awesome article about what's really in a disposable diaper. Click here. Scary stuff, isn't it?

Then for today, we'll just continue with my Top-5 Reasons for Choosing Cloth:

5) What's cuter: Bright colors and unique prints, or crinkly paper and plastic coated and filled what who knows what? Gimme my cloth!! I love how soft and cute it is on Orren!

4) I vote with my dollars for family-owned companies, work-at-home-moms, and products made right here in the US of sustainable materials such as organic cotton and hemp. A disposable diaper purchase is a vote for the corporate giants who don't give a crap about anything or anybody. I can do better than that, so I choose cloth.

3) The planet is sick from the amount of garbage our nation generates. I choose to do my part to reduce that by using cloth diapers. No, you will never convince me that cloth is less sustainable than disposable. I will believe that when we start wearing disposable clothes in the name of being green. It takes energy to wash diapers? Yeah, it does, but it takes energy to manufacture disposables and bring them to the stores, and I'm guessing my phosphate-free laundry detergent and my clothesline take a drastically smaller environmental toll than the Pampers or Huggies factory and the semi truck that brought the load of eventual trash to Wal Mart.

2) It's convenient. Modern cloth diapers are awesome. Admittedly, I do a bit of new and a bit of old-school, but it's all pretty great. From prefolds with awesome covers, to pockets that go on just as easily as a disposable (and are even permitted by the majority of daycares these days!) cloth diapering has a method to suit everybody. It's nowhere near as hard as people think it is. If my husband can master the art of the prefold (in fairness, he puts them on the baby prettier than I do!), anybody can find a cloth diapering system that is second nature to them.

1) I know the entirety of what our diapers are made of! There are no undisclosed ingredients, proprietary agreements, or trade secrets. I can tell you exactly what is sitting against my son's skin right at this moment. It's organic cotton which has never been dyed or bleached. Isn't that much nicer than a bunch of chemicals nobody can even pronounce, which have horrible long-term side-effects?


These are my Top-5 reasons for choosing cloth! Oh, and I forgot one.

Reason #1-a) I never wasted my husband's hard-earned pay on whatever the hell "Pamper's Dry Max" is.