Day 73

Day 72

Prefolds

Well. That took a while.

Over a month ago, I promised a series of posts on cloth diapers, but then stuff happened. Mostly, Ellie happened. I won’t say that situation is entirely resolved, but she has her eyes closed at the moment, so I figure this is as good a time as any to catch up on some all-important blogging. (You may have also noticed the flood of daily picture posts below… we’re still catching up, but we’re much less far behind than we were. If for some reason two photos a day of our kids aren’t enough for you, you should probably also be watching my Flickr photostream, which has rather a lot of photos in it.)

So! Diapers!

Julian and Eloise each go through between six and eight diapers a day, and the vast majority of those are prefold cloth diapers. Prefolds are rectangles of absorbent cotton that have been folded over several times and quilted together so the thickest part of the fabric is right where the action happens. We use the unbleached version, because (if for no other reason) it seems silly to employ a sparkling white item for such a dirty business.

There is a little advance work you have to do to use prefolds. Rachel put them through three wash cycles before we used them, which shrinks, softens, and thickens them.

The Twist

Since they’re just rectangles, you have to fashion them into a little baby loincloth when you put them on. We use a slightly different wrap technique for each baby. Ellie, as you can see in the pictures, gets the “twist.” You put the prefold under her butt, twist it around to form an hourglass shape, and pull the front up. This focuses the twisted (and thickest) part of the diaper where her business end is. For Julian, we fold the front into thirds, vertically, and then pull it up, focusing the thickest part of the diaper in front, which is where the peeing happens.

Snappi

In this day and age, you aren’t forced to hold them together with sharp safety pins. Instead, you use a clever little plastic doodad called a Snappi. It’s a Y-shaped piece of stretchy plastic with little plastic teeth that grip the diaper fabric. You just wrap the diaper around the baby, snap on the Snappi, and voila. Secure and snug, and no pokes.

Diaper cover

Of course, that’s not quite it. Prefolds are absorbent (really absorbent) but not waterproof. Since you presumably don’t want pee to soak through the diaper onto your baby’s adorable outfit, you need to enclose the whole assembly in a waterproof diaper cover. Our favorites are the Thirsties covers which have double elasticized leg gussets to hold everything in and double-sided Velcro tabs for a snug fit, and come in a variety of cheery colors… which you’ll never see, since presumably your baby is wearing pants most of the time. Ah, well.

Cloth wipes and spray bottle

As I think I mentioned in the initial post, we use cloth wipes, as well. We use Thirsties wipes pretty much exclusively. We have a spray bottle on the changing table containing water with a little bit of soap dissolved in it. We just moisten the wipe, and go to down. They’re so soft, I wish I could use them. (Take a moment to enjoy that image, won’t you?)

Happy Baby

The dirty diaper and wipe go in the laundry pail, and unless it’s visibly soiled, the cover gets hung to air out for another use. (We basically have four covers in rotation—two for each baby—during a given day.) Since the covers have convenient Velcro tabs, we stuck a strip of Velcro tape under the edge of our changing table so we could easily hang the covers.

To recap: put on the prefold, snap on the Snappi, and Velcro on the cover. That’s it! I honestly think our cloth diapering procedure takes maybe 20 percent longer than a disposable diaper change. That seems completely worth it to me. (Not to mention that the prefolds cost about $2 each, and we’ve probably used each one more than thirty times. Compare that to the cost of disposables!)

Julian helpfully agreed to help Rachel demonstrate in the following video:

(Man, you can really tell from how tiny Ellie looks in the pictures how long ago we took these. Where does the time go? Also, since the babies are bigger now, the diapers fit much better, too.)

Day 71

Doctor

Our pediatrician is better than your pediatrician.

How do I know? Well, did your pediatrician call you from his holiday vacation just to chat and check on how your colicky baby was doing? Didn’t think so.

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Day 63

OMG

JULIAN SLEPT FROM 9:50 P.M. TO 6:15 A.M. LAST NIGHT!!!

That is all. Backlog of real posts to be addressed soon.

Day 62

Day 61

Month 2

Two Months

It is tempting, when considering the content of a post about our second month as parents, to write “Ellie cried” and leave it at that. Because honestly, that was by far the most prominent aspect of month two.

I know that other things happened in there, though. For example, we moved the twins out of their co-sleeper in our room and into their crib in their room. This seems like a big transition to me, but for whatever reason, unlike practically every other parenting move we’ve made, we barely discussed it — we just did it. It was time, though: their combined weight was creating a depression in the co-sleeper mattress, and it didn’t take long each night for them to roll into each other and wiggle around like two little jumping beans. Which, while adorable (“They’re snuggling!” Matt says), is not conducive to long stretches of sleep. They sleep better in their cribs, and we sleep better with them there.

In fact, as difficult as the second month was (I’d venture that it was even harder than the first month), I do realize that some things have actually gotten easier. Part of it is just that we’ve figured some stuff out: bouncy seats are magical, Ellie and the pump should each have a designated boob each day so they don’t have to compete for resources, muffins and other one-handed foods make eating breakfast more likely, and a tiny bit of formula supplementation keeps Mama sane. The other part is that there are a (precious) few ways in which the babies themselves have gotten easier. Julian, for example, sleeps long stretches almost every night (anywhere from 5 to 8.5 hours). They poop less often, and usually not at all at night, so we do fewer diaper changes and none at night, which helps them go back to sleep more quickly after wakeups. And toward the end of the month, every so often, they started rewarding us with quick little (real) smiles and even the occasional big gummy grin. That makes everything feel worth it for about 30 seconds until the screaming starts back up.

Seeing their likes and dislikes emerge has also been fun. Eloise loves to have the hair dryer blown on her during diaper changes. (In fact, everything about the hair dryer makes her content. That, in combination with the fact that sticking her in a Tiffany’s box made her the happiest she’d been in days, makes me a little concerned that we have a real girly-girl on our hands.) She also loves looking at the pictures that we taped to the underside of the shelf above the changing table. She gives those things much more consistent smiles than she gives her parents. Basically if she could spend all day on the changing table, there would be no colic.

Julian likes…well, Julian seems to like just about everything just fine as long as he isn’t separated from his pacifier. Basically he’s as easygoing as Eloise is not. He particularly seems to like sleeping on our shoulders and cooing at the multi-colored giraffe on his activity mat. Oh, and eating. He doubled his birthweight in 2 months and went from less than one chin to three chins in the same amount of time.

So while there’s no question that our babies are still grubs, they are becoming grubs with more distinct personalities. Here’s hoping for tons more of that in Month Three.

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Day 53

Graph

We’ve been using Trixie Tracker if not quite religiously, at least diligently, and generally we love it. It’s been incredibly helpful not to have to remember when Julian last ate, or when Eloise last pooped, since we can just look it up. I’ll write at more length some other time about how we’re using the service and its strengths and weaknesses, but for now I’ll just share that I discovered the “export” feature and have been having some fun in Excel.

Here’s Julian’s eating history. We have a five-day trailing average of ounces of breastmilk+formula in blue (left axis) and number of bottles per day in red (right axis).

Julian's Bottles

The math nerd in me just got very excited. I could run a linear regression! Hypothesis: minutes slept per day is positively correlated with ounces consumed, and negatively correlated with minutes slept the previous day.

Day 52

Day 51

Stimulation

While Eloise’s colic can be all-consuming for her parents, Matt and I do try to seize any opportunity she gives us to focus on non-bouncing/shushing aspects of child care. One thing we both really enjoy is seeing the babies fixate on something of visual interest to them. We noticed that in the mornings both kids, Ellie in particular, tend to spend a good bit of time gazing excitedly at the black and white photograph that hangs above the co-sleeper. (Yesterday morning they both spent 15 peaceful minutes alternating between quietly gazing and noisily pooping — very productive!)

We decided that it would be fun to give them a few more things to look at. We’ve heard that strong black and white contrasts and the color red are particularly appealing to young infants. So when we had a few minutes of quiet the other day, instead of doing urgent household chores, we made baby art. We have a couple of our masterpieces taped to the underside of the shelf that hangs over the changing table, and they are definitely attracted to them. It’s fun to see evidence of curiosity and interest, no matter how rudimentary.

Quiz: How like a baby are you? If you look at the images below with keen interest for longer than a minute, you are somewhat like a baby. If you start cooing, you are a lot like a baby.

Sorry about the odd clipping. I’m not sure how it happened, and it doesn’t seem important enough to take the time to fix (in light of the colic-generated drains on my time).