When you have multiple children, you go through a multitude of diapers. I almost always had two in need of this service in any given year. Living on a very modest, single income, due to my commitment to staying home with my kids, purchasing disposable diapers became a financial burden to great for us to bare.
We moved to cloth diapers. ‘Ugh’…I can hear you moan. We didn’t buy wipes either. Another wet diaper worked just fine for that. Before you say, “I could never do that,” let me tell you the benefit. I figured I saved our family around $26,000 over the almost twelve years of diapers use. That could have gone a long way in putting a down payment on a house! Okay, so the dunking in the toilet part wasn’t fun but I regularly chanted to myself, “Some day you won’t have to do this.” And you know what, I was right. This helped me when I felt especially grossed out. On a very rare occasion, I asked my sister if she could babysit for a weekend while Jer and I got away for a couple nights. My sister was not a mother at this point and we are very different from one another. She’s spontaneous and loves the adrenaline of thinking in the moment. I like to plan, be organized, and make detailed lists. I posted my morning to night instructions on the frig for her, clearly laying out every hour of the day. When to feed our now two children, schedules for naptime, mealtime, bedtime, the process for putting them to bed and whatever else my mom brain could think of, as I prepared to leave my precious daughters in my sister’s inexperienced hands. Her anxiety grew as she struggled to keep in step with my schedule. How do you get two small girls to go to sleep on time? She was already off track. What do you do when they refuse to eat the food they were supposed to? But nothing compared to one very important detail I forgot to tell her….I guess I assumed it would be obvious…what do you do with a poopy cloth diaper? To my sister’s dismay, she couldn’t figure out for the life of her what to do. Traumatized and not thinking clearly, she took the non-desirable mess to my kitchen sink and promptly dumped it’s contents down the drain. (Slap hand to forehead) What was she thinking? As you can imagine, after two and a half days of putting poo in the sink, it caused some problems. The garbage disposal wasn’t any help. She didn’t want me to know. After a lot of bleach, gagging, and more bleach she successfully hid the evidence from me, her younger sister. Embarrassment kept her lips sealed. Lucky for her the girls were two young to tell on her. It wasn’t until a couple years later, after we moved out of that duplex, she finally told me her horror story. She did eventually realize what she should have done with the contents of those diapers but not until after she went home and had gotten some sleep, did she regain her senses. I don’t quite remember if she ever babysat again for us.
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