Wednesday, February 6, 2008

Look Ma, I'm standing! (Plus our diaper situation)

That's right, Suzi has learned to pull herself up. Here she is practicing her new skill on her favorite toy, the Learn-Around Playground:

The only problem is the toy is not heavy enough and she will pull it over on herself if we don't stop her. I plan on buying four padded dumbbells and tying one to each leg to make it more stable. (Unless you have a better idea--in which case, please leave a comment.)

She's so excited about standing that it wakes her up in the middle of the night. She'll cry and when Jordan goes to her room she is standing or squatting, holding onto the rails of her crib. She knows how to stand up but hasn't figured out how to sit back down! When this happens we put her in bed with us and I feed her, and a couple of hours later she goes back to her room.

And now for an update on our diaper situation. We are using cloth ones most of the time, but when Suzi goes to Grandma and Grandpa's she wears a disposable because we haven't gotten them set up for cloth ones yet. Here is our diaper laundry:

I want to explain how we are doing this in case anyone might be inspired to try it. It was easy! First, we made some cloth wipes out of t-shirts. Those work great as long as you use them fast enough that they don't start to sour. Then it's time to wash them and start over. We keep ours in a plastic container with enough water to keep them damp. For diapers we are using waterproof velcro covers and Chinese prefolds, which have worked fine. We change the prefold every time and about half the time we can let her continue to wear the same cover. I plan on buying some fancy all-in-ones ASAP, but these require the whole diaper to be washed after every change so we'd need more of them.

What helped us most was having a place to store our dirty diapers before we washed them. I found a perfect little diaper pail at Burlington for about $10. You can open it by stepping on a pedal, and the inside lifts out so I can dump and rinse it. I put a little white vinegar and a few cups of water in the bucket and we throw the dirty diapers in there (we dump any solid poop in the toilet first). Vinegar is one of God's little miracles, because when I went to empty the bucket for the first time it didn't stink, period. I just dumped it in the washer, did a rinse cycle, and then washed them in Dreft. We dried them and now they're ready to go again. To save electricity we may hang them next time.

The take-home message: It is really not that hard or expensive; that's just what Pampers and Huggies want you to think.

2 comments:

Vicky said...

You can tell in Suzi's eyes how excited she is about standing! It just seems like yesterday both of my boys were doing the same thing. I know on our leap frog music table we could take the legs off and just let the base sit on the floor when we were not able to hold the table for them.

Beth said...

Haha, well I guess when Elaina starts playing outside I'll invest in a BB gun and send out a memo to all the neighbors "Any dogs that are not mine and are caught in my yard will be shot...you have been warned" :-) Hehe, what a big girl! Yeah we had the problem of things falling over once Elaina learned to stand up....I agree with taking the legs off if possible.