Three months ago, before I fell off the planet, I began a series about my most favorite frugal find for babies–cloth diapers.  “Find” makes it seem like I’m one of the only people in the world who know about them.  Not true.  In fact, cloth diapers seem to be making quite a come-back.  If you’re curious about them and all they entail, this is the place for you.  First, check out my post on the Ugly Misconceptions about cloth diapers that I tried to Expel.  Today I’ll simply be discussing why they are so beautiful to me.

The Reasons Cloth Diapers are so Beautiful

1. They save a TON of money

Last time I discussed in detail how cloth diapers save us money over the “normal” disposable diapers.  Here is what I wrote on the subject then:

The average cloth diaper, after tax & shipping & whatnot, is about $20 each.  For one child you need about 18 (for two, I’ve heard 24 works well).  So that’s $360.

Now think about disposable diapers.  Each package is like $50 for 275 diapers (and that’s a pretty good deal).  So you can buy 2,000 disposable diapers for the same $360 you could buy cloth diapers for.  How long will it take you to go through 2,000 disposable diapers?  Let’s say you change a diaper every 3 hours and your baby sleeps for 12 hours each day.  That’s 5 diapers a day (this is a low estimation).  So in 400 days, which is about 13 months, you’d easily make up the money you’ve spent on cloth diapers.

Remember, though, you’re going to use more than 5 diapers a day and this was just for 1 child.  (For instance, if you use 6 diapers a day, those 2,000 disposable diapers will only last you 11 months for one child).

If I were honest, this is really the only reason we decided to go with cloth diapers.  That is, that they were less expensive than disposables.  And really, I think that’s reason enough that they’re beautiful.  However, after having used them for a year, there are a few other reasons they are so lovely to me.

2. I just feel good using them

There’s just something about not creating a million pounds of waste that makes me feel good.   Re-using things (in this case, diapers), just makes me feel helpful.  That’s all :)

3. They’re just so darn cute

I mean, seriously, they are so cute.  I love picking out a color that will match Luke’s shirt and letting him run around in just a colorful little diaper all day (in the summer, of course).  They’re just fun, ok!? :)

4. They keep little bottoms from getting diaper rashes

Because they’re natural and don’t have who-knows-what in them, little booties are much happier!  If you’ve ever been around a baby with a bad diaper rash you know how sad it is–it’s our experience that cloth diapers keep Luke from getting near as many rashes as he does when he wears disposable diapers.

I’m not sure I’m going to be able to sell these in any other way.  The main reason cloth diapers are so wonderful is because they are so frugal, and like I said–that’s reason enough to use them!

Do you have any questions?  Comments?  Suggestions?  Tell us why cloth diapers are beautiful to you!

Next time: How we use cloth diapers

Happy Thanksgiving Week!  Yay for Thanksgiving!  I admit I’ve done absolutely nothing that I wanted to do in preparation for this holiday!  Oh well, this just isn’t the year for it.  At the end of this post I’ve listed two articles with ideas that I can’t wait to implement next year and I hope will be helpful to you in cultivating a thankful Thanksgiving.

Our Perfect Turkey

I have never been a big fan of turkey.  It’s always been dry and chewy to me.  This includes when people say, “Oh, here, this is the best turkey you’ll ever taste.”  I just very rarely like it.  A few years ago my dad began frying our Thanksgiving turkeys and while it was much better than the traditional roasted type of bird, we used a lot of oil to get that thing cooked.  This year he’s trying a no-oil frying method.  I don’t know what that means, but I’m excited to taste it.

H-E-B has had a deal for a few weeks (it ends on the 24th!) where if you buy a spiral sliced ham, you get a 12 lb. turkey for free!  As soon as we heard about it we ran to H-E-B, bought the best ham ever, and got our turkey for free.  I found what promises to be the best way to cook a turkey here, and I must say: it turned out mighty yummy!  And so here are the instructions, for you, if you’d like to try Our Perfect Turkey. :)

The main difference between this recipe and all others is that with this recipe, when you cook the bird, you put it breast side down.

You will need:

• 1 turkey
• juice of a lemon
• salt & pepper
• olive oil or butter
• 1/2 yellow onion, peeled and quartered
• tops and bottoms of a bunch of celery
• 2 carrots
• parsley
• sprigs of fresh rosemary and thyme (optional)

1. Bring turkey to room temperature.  Let it sit out in a pan (in the original plastic) so that any juices will fall into the pan and not onto your counter.
2. Remove plastic wrapping.  Remove the neck and giblets (I know . . . ).  The original recipe has a link on how to use the heart and gizzard to make stock for stuffing and links on how to use all the gizzards to make gravy or a turkey soup.
   
3. If the turkey has plastic ties holding the legs together, you probably don’t need to remove them to cook (check the package instructions).  If you take the ties off, you should tie the legs back up before cooking with kitchen string.
4. Preheat the oven to 400  degrees F.
5.  Wash turkey and pat dry with paper towels.
6. Lather the inside with the juice from half a lemon.   Rub a small handful of salt all over inside.
7. Also inside the cavity, put half a yellow onion, peeled and quartered, a bunch of parsley, a couple of carrots, and some tops and bottoms of celery.  You may need to lay a piece of aluminum foil in there to keep everything inside.  Make sure the legs are tied tight, the wings are tied up close to the body, and the neck cavity is tied closed.
8. Rub olive oil or butter all over the outside of the turkey.  Sprinkle salt and pepper on the outside as well.
9. Put the turkey breast down on the bottom rack of your oven in a roasting pan.  Cooking it this way makes all the juices fall down into the breasts.  Add a few sprigs of rosemary and thyme if you have them to the outside of the turkey.
10. Check the cooking directions on the original packaging.  This is the tricky part.  For our 12 pound turkey we cooked it for 3 hours. (That’s 15 minutes for every pound.) For the first half an hour it baked at 400 degrees.  Then for the next hour and a half, we lowered the temperature to 350 degrees.  Then, for the final hour, we lowered it even more to 225 degrees.
11. Start taking the temperature (using a meat thermometer) every once in a while from about an hour before the turkey should be done.  Check the dark meat (the thighs) and the white meat (the breasts.)  The dark meat needs to reach 175 degrees F eventually, while the white should be 165 degrees F in the end.  Because the turkey will continue to get hotter after you remove it from the oven, you can take it out of the oven when the dark meat is 170 degrees F and the white 160 degrees F.  If you don’t have a meat thermometer, cut deep into the breast–the juices should be clear, not pink.
12. Once you take the turkey from the oven, let it sit 15-20 minutes, turn it breast side up, carve, serve, and enjoy!

Fabulous Sweet Potatoes

I love sweet potatoes.  I really do.  They’re such a wonderful treat and so good for you, too!  The following isn’t really a recipe as much as it is the easiest thing you’ve ever done to make the best sweet potatoes of your life–sans marshmallows!

• about 1 1/2 sweet potatoes for each person eating (for instance, if you’re serving 6 people, you need 9 sweet potatoes–you’ll have left-overs, but that’s the point of Thanksgiving dinner, right ;)
• butter
• cinnamon

1. Boil sweet potatoes.  (You can either peel them, leave the skins on because they’re good for you, or wait and peel them after they’ve been boiled)
2. Place quartered or sliced sweet potatoes in enough water to cover them.  Bring to a boil.  Lower heat to a simmer for 20-30 minutes.  Drain right away.
3. If you left the skins on and want to remove them now, submerge them under cold water and they should come off easily.
4. Mash the potatoes all up in a bowl or right in whatever you’re going to serve them in.
5. Add butter–I don’t know how much–they taste wonderful without butter, too, so it doesn’t really matter.  Just put a little in, taste it, and do whatever you want!
6. Sprinkle and mix in some cinnamon to taste.
7. Serve and enjoy!

I love this recipe because it’s so easy and it tastes so good and it’s relatively good for you (depending upon how much butter you add, of course).

Some Thanksgiving Reads

Just because I haven’t done anything special for Thanksgiving, doesn’t mean I haven’t read about things other people are doing!  Here are two great articles dedicated to focusing on being thankful during Thanksgiving:

• “Think about a Thank You”- by my sweet friend, Monica, at A Godly Heritage
• “5 Meaningful Things to Do In Preparation for Thanksgiving” -from Passionate Homemaking

That’s all for this week!  I’ll be spending the rest of the week celebrating with my sweet family.  I pray you focus on all the blessings God has given you (mostly, Jesus!) this week as you cultivate a spirit of thankfulness in your home.  Happy Thanksgiving!

This post is linked to

Menu Planning Mayhem

over at Desiring Virtue.

Probably for most of you when you think about cloth diapers the last thing you think about is beauty.  However, for those of us who have experienced cloth diapering, “beauty” really isn’t that far off from the truth.  There are so many wonderful things about clothing those cute little booties with soft, soft cloth and bright, sweet colors!  Not convinced?  Well maybe I can help.

Today I’m going to expel some ugly misconceptions associated with cloth diapering, next week I’ll explain how beautiful it really can be, and the following week I’ll give you the 401 on how to use cloth diapers–which ones we use, why we use them, how we use them, etc.  I’ll even show you some options that we don’t use!  My hope is not necessarily to convert you to a life of cloth diapering, but just to educate.  

Some Ugly Misconceptions Expelled

1. You have to touch poop all the time.

Ok, so it’s true that you have to deal with poop more than you might while using disposable diapers, but it’s really not nearly as bad as you might think.

When there’s a dirty diaper you simply drop the waste into the toilet (without touching it) and then rinse the diaper under cool water.  You might sometimes need to scrub a bit and your fingers may come into contact with some poop, but seriously.  That’s what soap is for.  It doesn’t take long to get over it, either–trust me.

2. You have to constantly be washing the diapers.

This was the thing I was most concerned with.  I mean, I really don’t care for laundry.  However, we have 18 diapers and I wash them every third(ish) day.  It doesn’t seem like that often at all.  It’s a quick load and it’s easy to grab them out of the dryer and put them back where they go.

3. You have to hand-wash them.

I suppose there may be brands of cloth diapers out there that you can only hand-wash, but for the brand we use (and all of the ones I’ve ever looked into) this is not the case.  I have used my washer and dryer to clean our diapers for almost a year and they are still in great condition.

4. You have to use super-expensive soap to wash them.

Ok, it’s true that the brand of cloth diapers we use recommends using a detergent that is not full of chemicals.  But since I use a natural detergent for my laundry anyway, we already have the proper soap on hand.

I think the thing that worries people about natural soap is that it is too expensive.  However, that’s just not the case.  Natural soap, although it often comes in large quantities and so might be more expensive up-front, is almost always cheaper in the long run (and better for you anyway).

5. They get really gross and dirty looking really fast.

I suppose if you let them sit for days cloth diapers might end up getting bad stains on them and looking gross after a while, but my diapers still look almost new.

6. They give babies diaper rashes worse than disposable diapers.

I’ve heard this, but I don’t understand it.  It just doesn’t make sense and it’s not my experience.  The only thing I can think is that a new little booty might get a bad diaper rash if the cloth diapers being used are getting washed in a detergent that is too harsh.  Our experience is that Luke gets far more rashes when using disposable than cloth diapers.

7. They don’t hold as much waste as disposable diapers.

There might be something to this if you keep a diaper on for hours and hours.  However, we’ve had the same number of “blow-outs” or “leaks” you would expect with disposable diapers when we change the cloth diaper every 3-4 hours.

It’s true that for a while we were getting leaks on the inside thigh, but we figured that out: I wasn’t rinsing them well enough and so there was build-up.  (gross, I know . . . I’ll explain more about that later in this series)

Overnight is a different story, though.  In fact, because Luke pees so much and sleeps so long during the night we’ve started using a disposable at night.  Even that one diaper a day, though, still keeps the cost under what we would be spending if we only used disposable diapers.

8. They are too expensive.

This, I think is the misconception I’ve heard most.  They are expensive up-front, it’s true.  The average cloth diaper, after tax & shipping & whatnot, is about $20 each.  For one child you need about 18 (for two, I’ve heard 24 works well).  So that’s $360.

Now think about disposable diapers.  Each package is like $50 for 275 diapers (and that’s a pretty good deal).  So you can buy 2,000 disposable diapers for the same $360 you could buy cloth diapers for.  How long will it take you to go through 2,000 disposable diapers?  Let’s say you change a diaper every 3 hours and your baby sleeps for 12 hours each day.  That’s 5 diapers a day (this is a low estimation).  So in 400 days, which is about 13 months, you’d easily make up the money you’ve spent on cloth diapers.

Remember, though, you’re going to use more than 5 diapers a day and this was just for 1 child.  (For instance, if you use 6 diapers a day, those 2,000 disposable diapers will only last you 11 months for one child).

A Note on When We Don’t Use Cloth Diapers: I feel like this is necessary to explain while I’m talking about the expense of cloth vs. disposable diapers.  I’ve explained that we use one disposable at night.  We also use disposables when Luke stays with someone else, or we have a babysitter over, or when he’s in the nursery at church.  While it’s our preference that he use cloth diapers, there’s no reason to make other people deal with them.  We want to bless those who love us and our little man enough to watch him, and so we don’t make others who have not chosen to use cloth diapers use them.  This increases the number of disposable diapers we must buy.  We usually use (including the night-time diapers) 14 disposable diapers each week.  This comes to about 56 disposables/month, or about $10/month.  This $10 is worth it to us to bless those who take time to bless us!

These are the ugly misconceptions I’ve heard most about beautiful cloth diapers. Have you heard others?  Do you have any questions/comments/concerns?  Leave a comment!

Next time: The Reasons Cloth Diapers are so Beautiful