An eye-opening experience for me as a new parent was how many diapers we went through. Light days were only a handful, but some days were a dozen.
I know people who use cloth diapers because the idea of millions of these things a year going into landfills was unconscionable. It weighed heavy on me to throw away the plastics, but we lacked the systems to make cloth viable for our family. Keeping up with just clothes was tough enough.
Actually, due to the Wisdom of Repugnance, Ada would have difficulty reclaiming many of the diapers. Fleur lost 2-3 dozens of articles of clothing after blowouts where we gave up on getting them clean.
So the idea from this article taking the materials for concrete sand intrigues me. I hope it becomes an industry standard because it sounds awesome.
As a male, I am supposed to be emasculated by wearing pink or having such colored things. They signal my effeminate nature? Or homosexuality? Something like that. Of course, the same men upset about it wear the pink shirts their spouses make them wear.
Fleur has a couple diaper bags.
Justice League backpack with Batgirl, Wonder Woman, and Supergirl symbols. It is pink and blue.
Solid pink messenger bag.
Occasionally, people make comments about how much I must hate it being pink. Not at all.
First, we have them because they represent Fleur. We want to teach her to be a hero by standing up for truth and justice. The bag is sized for a child not much older than her. We carry it as a diaper bag until the time when she can wear it herself. (She has expressed interest in wearing.)
Second, the solid pink bag would be better if it were purple, but the loot crate service that sent it went with pink. It is a great bag outside the color. And, pink is a good clue to her being a girl. (A woman told me purple is not a girl’s color. Only pink is.) Her hair curls up on top, giving her a fauxhawk haircut. Plus, she is as tall as older boys.
Finally, in my archive of family photos is one of my uncle carrying his granddaughter’s pink diaper. This is from a dozen years ago. I don’t remember anyone commenting on this when it happened. It only stood out to me lately when looking through my photos. It seems like the most trivial of details that a male carried something of a singular unallowable specific color. And it only stood out because of late people seem to want to comment on it.
Pre-parent, I was aware of parents complaining about diapers. The complexity staggers the imagination.
Some brands work better than others, so one has to find the right balance of cost to failure rate. Get a bad model and one pays by having to get the poop out of clothes or even worse throwing away items.
Then there is the timing of switching the size. Each has a maximum weight limit, but I swear it seemed like when Fleur was close to the max size, there were more blowouts.
Comparison shopping even within a specific model is a pain because each store has different size boxes. So, you cannot just look at the price on the box. Instead, you have to try to calculate the cost per diaper to find the best deal.
To keep from going to brick and mortar stores, one might go online to get prices and do the math to save the amount of travel to just one store. One store’s website lists a 136, a 140, and a 144 count box of same brand, model, and size. $7 price difference between the largest box and the others which are the same price. Which comes out to about 4 cents per diaper difference.
The stores also know they overprice them and somehow when we need to buy again, they always have some kind of deal. The same store as above likes to offer a gift card if you purchase over a certain amount AT THE SAME TIME doing a multiple amounts off for buying them as a pickup.
So, the formula is: ([(list price – discount) x number boxes] – gift card) / (number of diapers per box x number of boxes)
Huggies, I think is trying to be as confusing as possible. They have three similar sounding models:
Snug & Dry
Little Snugglers
Little Movers
I think this is mainly due to the fact the size 3 hits all three models. Once we get to size 4, I think it goes back to just have to decide between a couple models again.
Started reading some dad blogs and ran across something that felt pretty right on Biff the Runner:
At times I feel completely useless. With the baby as I don’t know why they are crying or what I’m supposed to do. At work I’m less productive as I’m tired and find it harder to motivate myself and focus.
This means I over compensate particularly at home trying to make myself useful cleaning, cooking, anything. This makes me more tired.
For me it meant:
Managing the water bottles. We have 2 Brita filter containers that I try to keep full and a half dozen bottles. I end of tracking them down across the house & car and filling them.
Changing diapers.
Soothing Flower, especially when she was upset with gas between 4 and 8 am. Ant’s Go Marching and Dear Liza are my go-to songs.
Keeping supplies full & shopping. Diapers, wipes, paper towels, toilet paper, snacks, cat food, cat litter. (Still pretty terrible at this. Writing this reminded me that I need to get litter despite going to the store before work to get toilet paper because I did not realize we were out when I went yesterday.)
Dealing with the teenager: cajoling to do chores, getting things needed, taking to places.
I have a much younger brother, so I wasn’t scared of changing a diaper, especially because she cannot shoot pee at my face. Other things new fathers are supposedly scared of like holding her, giving her a bottle, etc all are skills I’ve had for decades.
Well, maybe the first bath. She had a five wiper blowout where poo was still everywhere. I needed to give her a bath, but the wife had gone somewhere so I was on my own. I had to make all these choices on how to handle it on my own. So many potentially wrong choices, but we both survived it.
For me it meant:
Polymath Parent 