growing!

Luka had his four month well visit, and everything seems to be coming along fine. While he is still pretty small for his age, (1% for weight, .52% for height, and .4% for head circumference) the rate that he's growing is good. Check this out as a comparison. Here's the kid at 2 1/2 months with a size small diaper:



And here he is at 4 months wearing the same size diaper:



What a difference! As of Friday, he weighs 10 lb 14 oz.

diapering the baby.

:l


:D

When I was pregnant, we decided to use cloth diapers when Lu came around. The initial investment is a bit spendy, sure, but purchasing $20 worth of diapers each week ends up costing WAY more in the long run. Not to mention the huge amount of waste disposables add to the landfills. There are so many different cloth diapering options available, it was making my head spin. We still had not made a final decision on what diapers to go with when Luka arrived early in February. Once we found out how teeny tiny he was, it made the decision even harder! Originally I wanted to go with the "one size" variety, that are adjustable up through potty training. But I worried that these would be way big on our preemie. I was right.


Lu and the giant diaper

The diaper above isn't even a "one size". It's a FuzziBunz Perfect Size in size small, which is supposed to fit 0-8 months. That picture was when Luka was almost three months. We have two of those diapers that a friend purchased from our registry. So now that Luka has had an obvious growth spurt, I tried that same diaper shown above. And on the smallest setting, it fits like a glove! That's some growth spurt. So we are thinking that since he is four months this weekend and is able to wear the small "perfect size" on the lowest setting, it's likely that he can stay in that size (with adjustments) up to maybe 10 months or more. We test drove the two we have, and really like them, so now we have eight more of the FuzziBunz Perfect Size smalls on order. Once he gets a bit bigger, we want to set him up with a stash of the more cost effective Kawaii one size diapers to hopefully carry him through to potty training. I haven't decided if we will do disposables at night yet or not. The disposables keep him from feeling as wet over a longer period of time, which would certainly help right now with us trying to get him to sleep longer than three hours at a time. But we will experiment with the cloth, adding a second insert to see if that helps.

Of course this means that we have been using disposables up to this point. So if a vegan needs to use disposables, what kind do you use? I was talking to Miss Jill about this very thing yesterday. Most major disposable diaper brands are owned by companies that animal test. Huggies is Kimberly-Clark, Pampers is Proctor & Gamble, Luvs is also Proctor & Gamble (this confused me, and I ended up using Pampers for a while, thinking they were okay). Then there are the generic store brands that are available, like Target, Babies R Us, Kroger, Publix, Etc. From what I understand, generic brands don't typically test, they just use research that has already been done by the giants P&G and others. Then there are the more costly cruelty-free brands such as Earth's Best and Seventh Generation. We mostly use Earth's Best and generic now, with Earth's Best being the less leaky option. Since we won't have to buy very many disposables anymore, I think we will stick with Earth's Best.

I'm so excited to be starting with cloth diapers! Even the extra laundry hasn't dampened my spirits yet. So do tell- what kind of cloth do you like best?