CANADA: What’s Wrong With Cloth Diapers?

Of all of my parenting decisions, my choice to use cloth diapers raises the most eyebrows.

People tend to treat it like an admirable but inconvenient decision that they would never seriously consider themselves, like converting your car to run on vegetable oil or biking everywhere instead of driving.

They see it as difficult, and a little weird.

This bothers me, because I think my choice is more convenient, not less.

I use a diaper service, Happy Nappy, and since they bring my diapers to my door and take them away from me on a weekly basis, you could argue that my choice is actually lazier than using disposables, since I never have to go shopping for diapers. I don’t deal with any more poop than a parent who uses disposables. In fact, since I find that disposables have a deplorable tendency to leak poop down my baby’s leg, I actually deal with more poop when he’s in disposables.

Their cost is comparable to disposables – around $25 a week – and service becomes free after you’ve been with them for 30 months, because kids usually potty train earlier in cloth diapers. So either my kid will be potty trained by 30 months, or I get free diapers. That makes it a cheaper choice, even with the convenience of a diaper service.

So here I am, making a cheaper and more convenient choice, but people respond as though I was hand-knitting my entire family’s wardrobe or something. (more…)

Carol (Canada)

Carol from If By Yes has lived in four different Canadian provinces as well as the Caribbean. Now she lives in Vancouver, working a full time job at a vet clinic, training dogs on the side, and raising her son and daughter to be good citizens of the world. Carol is known for wearing inside-out underwear, microwaving yoghurt, killing house plants, over-thinking the mundane, and pointing out grammatical errors in "Twilight". When not trying to wrestle her son down for a nap, Carol loves to read and write. Carol can also be found on her blog, If By Yes, and on Twitter @IfByYesTweets

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ILLINOIS, USA: Interview with “Polish Mama on the Prairie”: From Poland to the USA

ILLINOIS, USA: Interview with “Polish Mama on the Prairie”: From Poland to the USA

Where in the world do you live? And, are you from there?

I currently live in Illinois outside of Chicagoland.  I was born in Wroclaw, Poland and moved at age 1 to Austria to flee Communism with my parents.

We lived in a hotel in a village in Austria for about another year before we finally were taken by the Catholic Church to Maryland, where we lived in the inner city for a couple of years before moving to the suburbs of Maryland.

What language(s) do you speak?

I currently speak Polish and English.  I have had little opportunity to speak the German and French I knew as a child but am working on re-learning them again. (more…)