By the time she’s ten, my daughter probably won’t have any vivid memories of her cloth diapering years. In fact, experts say that most people cannot recall much of anything substantial before they are three or four years old. All I have to say is that it’s a darn good thing I’m taking lots of pictures.
Hopefully someday, she’ll look back at her baby pictures and notice her cute, fluffy bum poking out of her adorable outfits (though it will be a different experience from my own because my daughter has literally thousands of baby/toddler pictures while her mama probably has about 30. Certainly makes me wonder how all of these digital pictures will affect the memory and recall of certain events for our children…But maybe that’s another discussion for another day).
Anyway, I know that she won’t remember actually being in cloth diapers, but I hope that somehow the knowledge that she was cloth diapered will remind her of a few things for the rest of her life:
- The earth is our only home and it’s up to us to take care of it. Big things, small things, it all makes a difference. And the difference cloth diapering makes really adds up. She can be proud of the environmental commitment her family made.
- She was a trendsetter. When she’s reflecting on cloth diapering (perhaps it will be when she’s considering cloth diapering her baby), I hope – for all of our sakes – that cloth diapering is a much more mainstream practice. She can tell her friends that she was cloth diapered back when wash-at-home pocket diapers were still in their infancy (or toddlerhood as the case may be) and they can ooh and aah and say that there is no way they would ever think about putting their baby in disposables!
- (And along those lines…) She is the next generation in a long line of cloth diaper wearers. Her mama wore prefolds with pins and plastic pants in the seventies when disposables were all the rage, her grandfather was doted upon by his mother and childless aunts and probably never sat in a wet cloth diaper for more than one minute. And that brings us back to countless generations before that who were also cloth diapered because there weren’t any other options. That’s some serious tradition.
- Her mama loves her. I’m not – AT ALL – saying that somehow cloth diapering mamas love their children more. Not at all. But I hope that she (and all children) will be able to look at the pictures of her in diapers and be able to see and feel the love that surrounded her in those early years.
- It wasn’t easy, but we did it anyway. There are so many wonderful benefits to cloth diapering that her dad and I chose to plop, rinse and swirl poop into the toilet and wash diapers in our laundry room all in the name of protecting her cute little behind.
- She has our help with college. It maybe doesn’t compute dollar for dollar, but we did save money by reusing her diapers and we were able to start a college savings fund for her and her brother. Truth be told, I think it’s so important to start saving for their educations when they are young, so we probably would have started a 529 anyway, but every bit helps!!
What do you hope your children take from their cloth diapering roots (whether they actually remember it or not!)?
Sarah is a mom of two and blogs about her adventures in motherhood, cloth diapering and everything in between. Catch her “Cloth Diapering Unwrapped” series on the FuzziBunz blog every week.
Tags: Cloth Diapering Unwrapped, cloth diapers, fuzzibunz cloth diapers
