Cloth diapering: Dealing with the "ick" factor

A fellow blogger mulling over the "cloth diapers vs. disposables" question recently asked me how I dealt with the "ick" factor of cloth diapering.

(The "ick" being the little treasures Monkey Boy regularly deposits in his diaper for us to find when we change him.)

"What do you do," she asked. "Empty solids into a toilet? Do you have to wring it out to get rid of liquids? Ick. And if you change it while you're out, can you just put the used one in a plastic baggie to take home? Ick."

Ick indeed, if you were dealing with the kind of poops that come out of adult bums, or teenage bums, or even snot-nosed little kid bums.

But the great thing is about newborns is, their runny little breastfed poos DON'T STINK.

It's true -- they don't!

And, not only do those little Hershey squirts start out so small to be virtually insignificant -- during the first week of your baby's life, you're actually WANTING him or her to poo, WAITING for it, BEGGING for it, because a decent number of poos per day is a good indication that your baby is eating enough and is healthy.

(This is how they mess with your head and turn your entire value system upside down. Poo good! Whiskey and cigarettes bad!)

Of course, the poos do get bigger over time, and they do eventually start to smell (especially when baby starts to eat something other than breastmilk -- which is why we won't be introducing solids to our Monkey Boy until he's roughly 13 years old).

But the process of "ickification" takes place over a period of months, and is so gradual that you're able to acclimatize yourself to it, so that dunking a pooey cloth diaper into a toilet bowl or a sink of hot water and swishing it around to get the chunky bits off actually doesn't seem that gross at all. Neither does sticking a dirty diaper into a plastic bag until you're able to dump it into the diaper pail.

Now, my attitude toward this might change once Monkey Boy starts eating solid food. My brother (a father of three) takes great sadistic pleasure in assuring me that the poos will indeed start to smell so bad that I will need a clothespin on my nose in order to deal with them. But I'll deal with that problem once I get to it (most likely by getting my lovely unsuspecting husband to change most of the pooey diapers, heh heh heh...).

AND... just in case you're caught up in the whole "cloth diaper vs. disposable" debate -- were you aware that the "proper" way to use disposable diapers is to scrape off all the poo and dump it into the toilet before throwing the diapers in the garbage?

Surprise! That's how the diaper manufacturers intend for their customers to use them -- at least, that's what they say when the ecohounds are hot on their heels.

But do you know ANYONE who actually does that?

So yeah, there's definitely an "ick" factor involved in dealing with diapers of any type. I suppose the advantage of cloth diapers is that you can wash the "ick" right out of a diaper and have it come out looking and smelling clean and fresh. Once you "ick" up a disposable dipe, on the other hand, it gets dumped into a landfill and stays "ick" for a very, very long time.

Ick.