Monthly Archive

Father came home and found his three children were outside, still in their pajamas, playing in the mud, with empty food boxes and wrappers strewn all around the front yard.

The door of his wife’s car was open, as was the front door to the house and there was no sign of the dog.
Proceeding into the entry, he found an even bigger mess. A lamp had been knocked over, and the throw rug was wadded against one wall.

In the front room the TV was loudly blaring a cartoon, and the family room was strewn with toys and various items of clothing. In the kitchen, dishes filled the sink, breakfast food was spilled on
the counter, the fridge door was open wide, dog food was spilled on the floor, a broken glass lay under the table, and a small pile of sand was spread by the back door.

He quickly headed up the stairs, stepping over toys and more piles of clothes, looking for his wife.
He was worried she may be ill, or that something serious had happened.

He was met with a small trickle of water as it made its way out the bathroom door. As he peered inside he found wet towels, scummy soap and more toys strewn over the floor. Miles of toilet paper lay in a heap and toothpaste had been smeared over the mirror and walls. As he rushed to the bedroom, he found his wife still curled up in the bed, reading a novel.

She looked up at him, smiled, and asked how his day went. He looked another bewildered and asked, “What happened here today?”

She again smiled and answered, “You know every day when you come home from work and you ask me what in the world did I do today ?” “Yes,” was his incredulous reply?

She answered, “Well, today I didn’t do it.”

Sorry for the lack of posting recently. I am going to take a little break from blogging for a while. Brad and I are currently very busy and I just don’t have the time to keep up. I will return sometime soon

This is a little post to wish my baby a happy birthday. I feels just like brought her home from the hospital.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY PRINCESS, WE LOVE YOU SOOOOO MUCH

When I was pregnant with Sophia I did a lot of research on baby products and how I wanted to handle having a newborn. I was sure that I wanted to breastfeed and have her sleep in her own room, but I was a little on the boarder line about diapers. I couldn’t decide whether I was going to go with cloth or with disposable diapers. Cloth diapers seemed a little harder to take care of and a little more work, but for some odd reason looked really appealing to me. It must be all the cute little designs that they put on the bum. I wanted to go with cloth, but we didn’t have a laundry facility in out suit and that made things a little complicated. To get to the laundry room I had to go out of our master bedroom through the back yard and then into the laundry room. For summer that was fine, but as most of you know Sophia was born in November and it’s not exactly warm in Edmonton at that time. In the end I decided to go with disposable diapers, I just couldn’t go out into the cold so often. I told myself that once we move and have a laundry available I was going to switch.

There are so many benefits with going with cloth diapers. Sure, initially they’re pretty expensive, but in the end you only have to buy them once and not go out to Costco every month and spend $50.oo on diapers. They are very Enviromentaly:

• In 1988, over 18 billion diapers were sold and consumed in the United States that year.⁴ Based on our calculations (listed below under “Cost: National Costs”), we estimate that 27.4 billion disposable diapers are consumed every year in the U.S.
• The instructions on a disposable diaper package advice that all fecal matter should be deposited in the toilet before discarding, yet less than one half of one percent of all waste from single-use diapers goes into the sewage system.
• Over 92% of all single-use diapers end up in a landfill.
• In 1988, nearly $300 million dollars were spent annually just to discard disposable diapers, whereas cotton diapers are reused 50 to 200 times before being turned into rags.
• No one knows how long it takes for a disposable diaper to decompose, but it is estimated to be about 250-500 years, long after your children, grandchildren and great, great, great grandchildren will be gone.
• Disposable diapers are the third largest single consumer item in landfills, and represent about 4% of solid waste. In a house with a child in diapers, disposables make up 50% of household waste.
• Disposable diapers generate sixty times more solid waste and use twenty times more raw materials, like crude oil and wood pulp.
• The manufacture and use of disposable diapers amounts to 2.3 times more water wasted than cloth.
• Over 300 pounds of wood, 50 pounds of petroleum feedstocks and 20 pounds of chlorine are used to produce disposable diapers for one baby EACH YEAR.
• In 1991, an attempt towards recycling disposable diapers was made in the city of Seattle, involving 800 families, 30 day care centers, a hospital and a Seattle-based recycler for a period of one year. The conclusion made by Procter & Gamble was that recycling disposable diapers was not an economically feasible task on any scale.

Health:

• Disposable diapers contain traces of Dioxin, an extremely toxic by-product of the paper-bleaching process. It is a carcinogenic chemical, listed by the EPA as the most toxic of all cancer-linked chemicals. It is banned in most countries, but not the U.S.
• Disposable diapers contain Tributyl-tin (TBT) - a toxic pollutant known to cause hormonal problems in humans and animals.
• Disposable diapers contain sodium polyacrylate, a type of super absorbent polymer (SAP), which becomes a gel-like substance when wet. A similar substance had been used in super-absorbancy tampons until the early 1980s when it was revealed that the material increased the risk of toxic shock syndrome.
• In May 2000, the Archives of Disease in Childhood published research showing that scrotal temperature is increased in boys wearing disposable diapers, and that prolonged use of disposable diapers will blunt or completely abolish the physiological testicular cooling mechanism important for normal spermatogenesis.

Dryness:

• The most common reason for diaper rash is excessive moisture against the skin.
• Newborns should be changed every hour and older babies every 3-4 hours, no matter what kind of diaper they are wearing.
• At least half of all babies will exhibit rash at least once during their diapering years.
• Diaper rash was almost unheard of before the use of rubber or plastic pants in the 1940s.
• There is no significant difference between cloth and disposables when it comes to diaper rash.
• There are many reasons for rash, such as food allergies, yeast infections, skin sensitivity, chafing, and chemical irritation. Diaper rash can result from the introduction of new foods in older babies. Some foods raise the frequency of bowel movements which also can irritate. Changes in a breastfeeding mother’s diet may alter the baby’s stool, causing rash.

Cost:

• We estimate that each baby will need about 6,000 diapers⁷ during the first two⁸ years of life. The following estimates are based on prices in San Francisco, California.

Disposables. For these calculations, let’s assume that a family needs about 60 diapers a week. In the San Francisco Bay area, disposable diapers cost roughly 23¢ per store-brand diaper and 28¢ for name-brand. This averages to 25.5¢ per diaper. Thus the average child will cost about $1,600 to diaper for two years in disposable diapers, or about $66 a month.

Diaper Services. Subscribing to a diaper services costs between $13 and $17 each week depending on how many diapers a family decides to order. Let’s assume the family spends roughly $15 a week for 60 diapers a week. This equals $780 annually and averages to $65 a month. Over the course of two years, the family will spend about $1500 per baby, roughly the same cost as disposables, depending on what type of covers are purchased and what type of wipes are used. If one adds in the cost of disposable wipes for either diapering system, the costs increase.

Cloth Diapers. For cloth diapering, each family will probably need about 6 dozen diapers¹⁰. The cost of cloth diapering can vary considerably, from as low as $300 for a basic set-up of prefolds and covers¹¹, to $1000 or more for organic cotton fitted diapers and wool covers. Despite this large price range, it should be possible to buy a generous mix of prefolds and diaper covers for about $300, most of which will probably last for two children. This means the cost of cloth diapering is about one tenth the cost of disposables, and you can spend even less by using found objects (old towels & T-shirts).

National Costs. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, there were about 19 million children under four in 2000. We could probably assume that there are about 9.5 million children under two and therefore in diapers at any one time. Based on previous studies, we estimate that 5-10% of babies wear cloth diapers at least part time. We will average these figures to 7.5% of babies in cloth diapers and 92.5% in disposables. This means that about 8.8 million babies in the U.S. are using 27.4 billion disposable diapers every year.

Based on these calculations, if we multiply the 8.8 million babies in disposable diapers by an average cost of $800 a year, we find that Americans spend about 7 billion dollars on disposable diapers every year. If every one of those families switched to home-laundered cloth prefold diapers, they would save more than $6 billion¹⁴, enough to feed about 2.5 million American children for an entire year. Coincidentally, the 2002 U.S. Census reveals that 2.3 million children under 6 live in poverty

This is where I got the information from..

Anyway, I am relly happy to have switched to cloth. I decided to go with FUZZI BUNZ because they’re so soft and really cute. Tune in for some pictures of her cute little cloth diaper bum

I know that I said that I was going to set up the privacy block on this blog on the 6th, but I am actually going to do it by the end of this week. I have already sent some of you invitations for the blog, but as you can tell you have to subscribe to wordpress to be able to read it.

On Saturday Night Brad and I got to go out to a Football game in Vancouver. It was really fun because I had never been to a game and football didn’t make sense to me either. I finally get it, I guess all I needed was to see the game to understand it, and for Brad to explain it to me. It was my parent’s gift to Brad and I for our anniversary. I must say that the BC Lions cheerleaders are TERRIBLE. I have never seen such unenthusiastic group of cheerleaders in my life. Maybe it’s because I had never been to a real game and have only seen them in then movies, but that was really pathetic. Even I, who is very uncoordinated could be a BC Lions cheerleader. I wouldn’t want to be one, but I could be.

On Tuesday Brad and I celebrated our actual anniversary. I can’t believe how quickly 2 years had gone by. Didn’t I just say my vows, has it really been 2 years already??? I remember the day that we were getting married I went shopping with my mom for some lingerie and the girls at the store were shocked at how calm I was about the whole thing. I guess most brides on their wedding are sitting in hair salons for hours trying to get each strand to look just right, and there I was shopping just a few hours before the ceremony. Ahhh, the joys of not having a big wedding. I still don’t regret one bit of not doing things the traditional way. I am so happy to have such a beautiful memory in my head, the day that we got married was perfect. It was so smooth and quiet, everyone was calm and right after we got married it began snowing. It was the first snow fall of the year. That really was the best decision that I have ever made. Marrying Brad was the most wonderful and beautiful time of my life (before having Sophia). I have the best most handsome husband, wouldn’t trade my life for the world.

Today I took Sophia to a big group play date in Yarrow. Sara picked me up and on the way there Sophia just lost it. I had not hear that girl scream so loud in a long time. Of course as soon as we go tout of the car she was fine, but she did not make the ride very pleasant. The funny this is, is that Arianna didn’t even wake up from all that screaming. Sophie had a good time at the play date, she was very fascinated by all the little kids. It was a really fun thing to do. I think that we may do it again sometime. On the way back the freaked out and screamed even louder, to the point that she screamed herself to sleep. It was 1 hour past her nap time and she didn’t waste a second letting me know how unhappy she was about it. She cried so hard that she began hyperventilating. It was really sad to listen to, but once she fell asleep she was gone. I was able to take her out of the car seat, take her clothes off, and put her in the her crib without even a twitch. She is currently napping away. Poor little kiddo.

I am hungry so I will finish here. Like I said before, if you want to continue reading my blog you need to email me for an invite.

Sophia waiting to go for a walk