Solid

I can’t believe it’s finally time, but the twins started solid food for the first time today.

We’d been seeing signs that they were ready. For one thing, Julian’s been gobbling down more and more milk recently, so he seemed to be getting hungry. They’ve both also taken a strong interest in watching us eat, and they’ve had good success with slurping formula off a spoon when we practiced. And we’ve been excited about it, too: it’ll be fun to introduce them to new foods and new flavors, and figure out what they like and dislike.

The standard food to start babies with is rice cereal, but let’s be honest: rice cereal is basically gruel. I have no problem with them eating rice cereal on a regular basis—it’s healthy, easy to digest, not particularly allergenic, and so forth—but there’s no way my children are going to be initiated into the world of food with the same stuff that got spooned out to orphans in a Dickens novel.

For their ceremonial first meal, we decided to go with avocado. Avocados are pretty good for you, and they’re totally delicious, and they’re a pretty awesome shade of green, which we thought would make for an entertaining mess. So, this morning, I took a nice ripe avocado, put about two teaspoons of it in a bowl, mushed it up with a fork, and added water until we achieved the consistency of a slightly thin smoothie.

And what do you know! The kids liked it! Sure, it kind of went all over their faces, and a large amount got smooshed down their chins and on their cheeks, but they ate it! And seemed to enjoy it!

Check it out:

Tomorrow, we’ll give them a little rice cereal for “breakfast” and gradually add maybe a fruit in the morning, or an evening vegetable. For the first few weeks, I’m given to understand, solid food is intended as a supplement, not a replacement, for the nutrition and calories they’re getting from milk and formula, so it’ll still be bottle city around here for a while. Huh, I guess that means bottles and spoons to wash every day. Awesome.

Big Day: Live Blog

Well, here we go.

Click here to read the rest »

Open House

We’ll see whether I actually have time to post anything tomorrow, but I thought it might still be fun to let people follow along on my first full solo day, and to get a chance to see our baby data tracking in action.

For the next 24 hours, I’m turning on public access to some of the data we track daily using Trixie Tracker. If you’re interested to see how much and when Julian and Eloise eat, sleep, and poop, just pop on in!

(From today, for example, you can see that Julian napped for crap, while Eloise was a perfect angel.)

Solo

Yesterday was Rachel’s first day back at work since the twins were born. I’m sure she’ll have a lot to say about that on her own, but it also means a bit of a change for me. We’re incredibly lucky that the twins’ wonderful grandmother is going to be on the scene Tuesdays and Wednesdays for a while, so that means that I had a considerable amount of help yesterday.

Today, it’s just me (at least until 1:00 when the indispensable Abigail, our babysitter/helper, arrives). Wish me luck!

(Tomorrow I’ve got them on my own from 8-5… I’m thinking the only possible thing I can do, in this day and age, is to live-blog it.)

UPDATE

The day was a smashing success! Julian was a little more difficult than usual, but Eloise had, no question, the best day of her young life. (One day, she’ll graduate from college, and I’ll say, “Well, young lady, this is certainly exciting, but it’s no Day 166.”) She was smiley and playful and happy, and she let Abigail feed, hold, and play with her, and she didn’t really even fuss once. It was kind of eerie. Of course, now I’m exhausted. Here’s hoping tomorrow goes as well.

I’d Eat That

We’re getting closer and closer to starting the twins on solid food. In fact, we’ve tentatively scheduled their first “meal” for this weekend.

To practice, we’ve spent a few mornings feeding them a small amount of milk or formula on a spoon to get them used to what a spoon feels like, and what it’s like to have food in the front of their mouths rather than squirted towards the back. After some initial rejection, they both took to it like pros, and even started opening their little mouths when we brought the spoons close. So cute!

I’ve been planning for a while to make their food myself, rather than relying on little jars. Baby food is just a puree, right? I can make a puree, and if I make it I’ll know exactly what’s in it, and I can earn liberal elite points by only using the finest organic and locally grown fruits and vegetables. Plus, as it turns out, it’s super easy, and cheap as all heck.

Yesterday morning, I broke out a pot with a steamer basket and the food processor and made carrots, peas, pears (all steamed and pureed with a bit of water), and squash (roasted and pureed with a bit of water). The whole operation took maybe an hour and a half including cleanup, and check out the results!

Look at that vivid orange and green! And, I have to tell you, it tastes pretty good. Assuming you like carrots and peas and pears and squash, and who doesn’t?

It was odd to have to ignore most of my usual culinary instincts: no, the vegetables don’t need to be salted; no, the squash doesn’t need oil to bake up deliciously; and no, I didn’t need to worry about over-mixing the vegetables in the food processor. And, considering how bare bones the preparation was, and how delicious the results, I might have to rethink my usual inclination to season the hell out of everything I cook.

I’m also totally digging these cool 2 oz Baby Cubes for freezer storage. Should be awfully convenient.

Swings!

We went back to the playground last week, and got some video of the twins being adorable in the swings.

Hair

Eloise has yet to grow any hair to speak of, but Julian’s got quite the head of fluff going on, as you can see:

And, of course, you can style hair! Especially when it’s wet in the bath. Here, Julian models the “preppy” look:

I expect fun in this vein to continue.

Bottles

I thought it would be interesting, for the sake of posterity, to record just how many bottles we go through in a day. I’ve gotten into the routine of making up all of the day’s bottles the night before, which means we get to see them all laid out:

• Julian’s morning bottle: 6 oz of milk
• One top-off bottle for Julian and Eloise before their morning nap: 2 oz of milk each
• Julian’s three daytime bottles: 5 oz of milk each
• Julian’s two prune juice bottles: 2 oz each (1 oz prune juice + 1 oz water)
• Bedtime bottles: 7 oz of formula for Eloise, 8 oz of formula for Julian, with a milliliter of TriViSol vitamins in each

It adds up to a lot of milk, a lot of formula to mix, and a lot of bottles to wash (as our friend Emilie beautifully documented).

Bottles Drying, by Emilie, Inc

When Julian’s prune juice issue finally resolves, that will be a relief. Of course, when Rachel goes back to work we’ll add three more daytime bottles for Eloise. Whew!

To The Playground!

Julian and Eloise took their first trip to a playground this morning! We had a great time at Humboldt Park on the East Side. The twins played on the swings, slid down the slides, and generally didn’t scream for about an hour. It was awesome.

Looky! A movie!

Check out all the pictures from our fun outing!

Things I Never Thought I’d Say

“You go get a Q-Tip. I’ll hold his butt closed.”

Goo

Hey, does embedding video from Facebook work?

Kinda! It’s too wide, apparently. Hmm. We’ll work out the kinks. In the meantime, enjoy this video of the babies squirming around at the doctor’s office.

Day Pooper

So, Julian and Eloise have both pretty much consolidated their pooping to the daytime, which is nice, since it means they don’t need overnight diaper changes. How do they know to do that? I find it kind of amazing that their little bodies can figure out that, for instance, nighttime is when they should have their longest stretch of sleep. Babies are cool!

(So: when you read the title of this post, did you immediately get this song in your head? Or this one?)

Separate Cribs!

I can’t believe it: this week our babies started sleeping in separate cribs. I remember their first night home from the hospital, when we put them in the co-sleeper in our room, and they were so tiny I figured they’d never grow out of it. Not only did we have to graduate them to a crib in their own room by two months, but this week Julian started scooching around so much at night that he was shoving Eloise aside and knocking her head into the crib rails. The choice was clear. Another milestone passed.

While it was slightly bittersweet (in the sunrise, sunset kind of way) to put them in their own cribs, I mostly just thought it was pretty cool to see them there. It really drove home to me how much they’ve grown (notice that I do not say how fast they’ve grown — that first night home from the hospital seems like an eon and a half ago). So much good stuff is ahead, and it finally seems as though we just might get to it someday.

By the way, Julian continues to scooch. And last night, suddenly the sound of the mobile music came over the monitor. He’d turned himself sideways and had managed to kick the button that starts the mobile, waking up Eloise but not himself.

Talent

Earlier this week the brilliant, talented, and award-winning photojournalist Emilie Sommer paid a visit to our house to capture a slice of our lives with infant twins. Not because we’re interesting and newsworthy, but because Emilie has been my friend for 27 years and brought her equipment with her when she came to meet the twins. She recounted her visit on her blog and can I just say wow! I had no idea our lives were so photogenic! Go check it out here.

Seriously, Emilie is the best of the best. As she was snapping pictures during her visit, I repeatedly thought to myself that she must have regretted lugging all her camera equipment with her since we were being so dull. I honestly believed that she couldn’t possibly be getting any worthwhile photos. And yet she captured the grind of our daily lives in a lively and compelling way — without ever once suggesting that we alter our activities for the sake of a photo. I always knew she was damn good, but until she took cool photos of our rather mundane activities, I didn’t realize how good. She can make anything look great.

(So if you’re in the Portland (Maine) area, or even if you’re not, and you’re getting married and looking to splurge on the best wedding photos money can buy, look no further. Lucky for you, Emilie retired from following presidential candidates around the country for USA Today and the Washington Post and now brings her tremendous skill to capturing weddings with the same genuine photojournalistic style.)

I would be remiss if I didn’t also note that with the time Emilie wasn’t snapping pictures of us, she was washing bottles, reorganizing the tupperware cabinet, repeatedly pushing the “reset” button on the Fisher Price Cradle Swing so that the white noise wouldn’t abruptly stop (one day I will write Fisher Price a letter to tell them how stupid it is that the white noise is on a mandatory timer), ordering and picking up an amazing sushi spread, making our bed, and telling me to get over it when I kept protesting that she didn’t need to do all that. And when she wasn’t doing all those things, she was giving me pep talks to combat my low moments about the challenges of caring for two babies full time.

Emilie is an amazing person, and I feel so fortunate to be approaching three decades of friendship with her. I am crushed that I have to miss her wedding to the wonderful J in St. John — St. John! — in April, but I know that we’ll make up for it with many other happy times together. We’ve already pledged to drink gin and tonics while our kids play on the beach in Maine one day. I can’t wait.

Sleepiest

If I may just brag on my son Julian for a second, check out these all-time stats (courtesy of Trixie Tracker):

Longest single sleep
11 h 12 min 8:46 pm to 7:58 am on Friday, Jan 16th
11 h 7 min 8:16 pm to 7:23 am on Monday, Jan 19th
10 h 14 min 9:01 pm to 7:15 am on Monday, Jan 12th

Most overnight sleep (between 6pm and 8am)
12 h 8 min Tuesday, Jan 13th
12 h 3 min Wednesday, Dec 31st
11 h 58 min Sunday, Jan 11th

UPDATE:By popular request, here are Ellie’s stats:

Longest single sleep
9 h 16 min 8:58 pm to 6:14 am on Friday, Jan 16th
8 h 36 min 8:16 pm to 4:52 am on Monday, Jan 19th
8 h 16 min 9:13 pm to 5:29 am on Tuesday, Jan 6th

Most overnight sleep (between 6pm and 8am)
12 h 18 min Tuesday, Jan 13th
12 h 14 min Saturday, Jan 10th
11 h 31 min Monday, Jan 19th

Pumping

Jill Lepore’s article in the latest New Yorker is pretty good, and I’m sure parents everywhere will read it with interest. It has, however, a decidedly anti-pumping tone—the frequent allusions to cows and dairy farms seem to reflect a distaste for the breast pump that I can understand on the one hand, but seems unfortunately narrow-minded on the other.

Lepore is indisputably right that the increased prevalence and social visibility of breast pumping is a response to the increased number of women in the work place, and that it’s an inadequate response:

One big reason so many women stop breast-feeding is that more than half of mothers of infants under six months old go to work. The 1993 Family and Medical Leave Act guarantees only twelve weeks of (unpaid) maternity leave and, in marked contrast to established practice in other industrial nations, neither the government nor the typical employer offers much more. To follow a doctor’s orders, a woman who returns to work twelve weeks after childbirth has to find a way to feed her baby her own milk for another nine months. The nation suffers, in short, from a Human Milk Gap.

There are three ways to bridge that gap: longer maternity leaves, on-site infant child care, and pumps. Much effort has been spent implementing option No. 3, the cheap way out.

Absolutely. Family leave policies in the United States are an embarrassment. A society that was truly committed to a workforce in which men and women, parents and non-parents, can participate equally would have public policies in place that do not penalize working women who choose to have children and do not force women to choose between their children and their careers. The stingy benefits that US law provides (twelve unpaid weeks of leave) make it easier to balance work and family the higher up the socioeconomic ladder one is, which means families that need the most support get the least.

But! The question asked by the article’s subtitle—”If breast is best, why are women bottling their milk?”—does elide a whole set of possibilities. If, for instance, your baby is unable to breastfeed but you’d like to feed him breast milk instead of formula, a pump is the best option. And, even in a country with policies that allow new mothers to take reasonable family leave, women may choose to return to work before six months. Pumps shouldn’t be the only choice for women who want a career and a breast milk-fed baby, but they are an important tool for parents.

Generations

One of the main reasons we schlepped the babies to St. Louis was so that they would have a chance to meet their great-grandmother, who’s been living there for the past few years. We took the opportunity to take a picture with four generations of Harveys–er, Rensins–well, Panishes:

Travel

We successfully made it to St. Louis! Julian and Eloise were remarkably well-behaved for the flight—Julian only screamed for about twenty minutes or so, and Eloise was a perfect angel. (Weird, right?)

Right at the end of the flight, Rachel remembered that our point-and-shoot camera takes video:

Flight

Rachel always used to declare that nothing made her want kids less than the sight of a family with small children struggling their way through an airport. Well, it’s our turn. Tomorrow we’re going to attempt to take the twins to St. Louis to visit their grandpa and meet their great-grandmother. Are we insane? Probably, yes.

We’re lucky that my sister Lauren and her girlfriend Morgan are saints. They agreed—no, actually, they volunteered—to come with us so we’d have some extra adults to help carry babies, luggage, and whatnot on the trip. Thanks to their help and careful planning, I’m worried, but not struck dumb with terror, about how tomorrow will go.

Nonetheless, if you want to send good vibes to us and the other, unsuspecting, passengers on American flight 5345, that would be appreciated.

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.)

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.

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.

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.

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).

Colic

Since the cause is not conclusively established and the amount of crying differs between babies, there is no general consensus on the definition of “colic”. Having ruled out other causes of crying, a common rule of thumb is to consider a baby “colicky” if it cries intensely more than three days a week, for more than three hours, for more than three weeks in a month. —Wikipedia [Yeah, yeah, I know.]

A simpler definition might be: colic is when your baby cries all the goddamn time for no goddamn reason.

So, Ellie’s going through a rough patch. She’s basically devolved into a finite state automaton with only three states: sleeping, eating, or screaming her head off. Since the only way to get her to stop screaming for any appreciable length of time is to transition her into another state, and since we can’t magick her to sleep, that’s meant a lot of feeding on demand and sore boobs for at least one of her parents.

The difference between the intellectual idea of “a crying baby” and your own frantically crying infant is really quite something. I know it’s a trite observation, but it’s true. Her crying somehow turns off my brain’s ability to reason and solve problems rationally, which seems like a pretty crappy evolutionary adaptation. It’s amazing we ever made it out out of the veldt.

Dr. Harvey Karp says colic is natural for a lot of babies. Developmentally, he says, it would be ideal for humans to spend a full year in the womb. Since this wouldn’t be ideal for their mothers who have to push them through the birth canal, evolution compromised at forty weeks or so. Dr. Karp refers to the first three months of life as the “fourth trimester” of pregnancy, and advises parents to treat their infants, in many respects, like fetuses. His techniques for soothing colicky babies (swaddling, sshhhing, etc.) are designed to replicate the womb environment. (Happiest Baby on the Block is one of the two books we wholeheartedly recommend for new parents.)

It makes sense, and it seems to work. Generally. Most of the time. Sometimes swaddling her and sshing her and swinging her just isn’t enough: Ellie seems to want to eat all the time, and we know she can’t be hungry all the time, so we realized she must just be comfort sucking. If she’s just sucking for comfort, rather than nutrition, then there’s really no reason she has to be attached to Rachel all day. Hence, we’re sending her to pacifier boot camp.

For a baby, Ellie is just terrible at using a pacifier (unlike her brother, who’s happy to be sucking on one every second of the day). For the first five or six weeks of her life, she would ostentatiously gag every time we put one in her mouth. We’ve been patiently and painstakingly working over the past few days on getting her to be able to take and hold on to a pacifier and it seems to be working. We’re starting to see more and more of the sweet cute little girl we remember from a few weeks ago, and we’re feeling a little less at our wits’ end.

Our yoga ball is getting a work out (she likes to be bounced on it), the swing we borrowed from Dana is on its third set of batteries (it seems to keep her calm to swing from side to side) and we’ve quadrupled our supply of “Soothies” pacifiers. We’re prepared, and we’re trying new routines and strategies and techniques, and generally trying to stay calmer than Eloise. Everyone tells us things start to calm down and ease up a bit after eight weeks. Or possibly twelve. They’d better be right.

Weight

I can now reveal to you my secret foolproof plan that will enable you, like me, to lose ten pounds in a mere three weeks. Just follow these easy steps:

1. Have twins.

Sleep

I knew last night went well, but I didn’t consider quite how well until I heard Rachel telling someone else: “Last night, Julian only woke up once between 10:00 pm and 6:00 am.” That sounds more impressive than, “I only had to feed him at 9:00, 2:00, and 6:00.”

Here’s hoping it lasts!

Cutest

Is there anything in this world cuter than a little baby sneeze?

No, there is not.

Cloth

When we told people we planned to use cloth diapers for the twins, people said we were crazy. Frankly, when Rachel proposed it, I thought she was crazy, but she quickly brought me around. Here are the arguments in favor of using cloth diapers:

• Disposable diapers put all kinds of freaky-ass chemicals up against your baby’s, well, ass. Disposables are incredibly absorbent, but they achieve that absorbency using space-age gels and such. These things might not be bad for your baby, but not using them has got to be better.
• Disposable diapers put tons and tons of crap, literally, into landfills, taking up valuable landfill space and potentially contaminating groundwater, etc. Cloth diapers have to be laundered, which uses lots of water, it’s true, but I think cloths still come out ahead, environmentally speaking.
• Cloth diapers are more expensive per diaper, but in the long run are much cheaper than disposables.

Some commonly asked questions seem to be:

Are you using cloth diapers exclusively? Heavens, no. We’ve only been using cloth for a week or two. We still pack disposables in the diaper bags for the few times we’ve ventured out of the house, and at this point we’re putting them in disposables overnight. We’ll probably switch to cloth overnight when they get a bit bigger and can fit into some of the other diapers we have.

Do you use a diaper service? No. There are probably some places that still have services that take away your dirty diapers and bring you fresh clean ones, but Providence isn’t one of those places. With two babies, we’re basically doing laundry once a day anyway, so an additional load of diapers isn’t too arduous.

Wait, you wash the diapers in your washing machine? With, like, poop on them? Yes. We do the diapers in a separate load from our regular clothes, and I think we run them through an extra rinse cycle, but at this stage in the babies’ development, their poop is pretty liquid-y. Things seem to be pretty clean. Really, it’s fine. Nothing else we own seems to be covered in poop at this time.

How do they work? Cloth diapers seem to have come a long way since the old days of safety pins and rubber pants. What I figure I’ll do is over the next few days (oh, who am I kidding: weeks) is do a series of posts on the different kinds of cloth diapers we’ve tried, and our impressions of each. It will either be fascinating or incredibly boring, depending on your personal interest in diapering. Non-parents, feel free to skim.

OK, so, there seem to be four basic types of cloth diapers. We have examples of three of the types.

Prefolds are the most basic type of cloth diaper. These are basically rectangles of absorbent cotton. You fashion the cloth into a little baby loincloth, and then put a waterproof cover over it. We’ve had good success with these: they’re our default diapering solution at present.

Fitted diapers are absorbent fleecy things that work just like disposables: they’re shaped like diapers, basically, with leg holes and Velcro tabs and all. You Velcro on the diaper, and then put a waterproof cover on it, just like with prefolds. I think these are the most convenient, although Rachel insists they’re somewhat less absorbent than the prefolds. We have two different brands of fitted diapers: Thirsties and Kissaluvs. (So far, the Kissaluvs are a little big for our babies, but they’re more adjustable than the Thirsties, so we expect to get a lot of good use out of them.)

Pocket diapers have a waterproof shell, a fleece lining, and a pocket in which to stuff a piece of absorbent fabric. We haven’t used any of our pocket diapers yet (small babies) but we’ll eventually try out bumGenius and FuzziBunz.

All-in-one diapers are one piece: waterproof exterior and super absorbent interior. They’re as convenient as disposables, except you have to wash them. We don’t have any of these at this point.

Since both prefolds and fitteds require waterproof covers, we have quite a few of them. Our favorites so far are the Thirsties covers, but we also have some Bummis, ProRap, and ImseVimse. After a few weeks of use, we can enthusiastically recommend the Thirsties. They have double leg gussets, which help keep the diaper tucked inside and prevent wetness from leaking out, and they have double-sided Velcro tabs, which allow you to overlap them for small babies.

With prefolds, you generally want some kind of device to hold the diaper in place under the cover. Although it’s possible to just fold the diaper into shape and then wrap the cover around it, we find that the Snappi fastener is extremely convenient.

As long as we’re being environmental, we can’t go using disposable diaper wipes, can we? No, we cannot. Instead, we use cloth wipes that we spray with a little soapy water before using. We like the Thirsties wipes best; the Kissaluvs can be a little rough on sensitive baby parts.

OK, seriously, I’ve gone on about cloth diapers for rather a long while here, and I’ve threatened more posts to come, so I’ll wrap this up. We do think using cloth diapers is a great choice environmentally and financially. We (mostly Rachel) did a lot of research into the best options, so we hope the results of our experimentation can be of use to anyone else.

Oh, crap, gotta go change a diaper.

Comparison

Before:

When Eloise came home from the hospital, she weighed 4 pounds, 15 ounces. At the pediatrician yesterday, she weighed 7 pounds, 6 ounces:

When Julian came home from the hospital he weighed 4 pounds, 12 ounces. At the pediatrician yesterday, he weighed 7 pounds, 8 ounces:

I’d say they’re plumping up nicely!