Look Mom, No Pins!

What happened to cloth diapers? Talk to your parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, grocery clerk. Ask any of them about cloth diapers. Everyone knows and will quickly tell you (along with other wonderful and unsolicited bits of advice) that cloth diapers are nothing but trouble. They are smelly, bulky and cumbersome and there are PINS! You have to wash deposits out of them in the toilet and there are PINS!

Thanks to the invention of wrist corsages, I (and other guys my age) have avoided the opportunity to start an evening off poorly by stabbing someone that we wanted to make a good impression on. After dodging that bullet, do I really want to make a terrible first impression on this wonderful little girl? “Welcome to the world! Here’s your first piercing.” No thank you, I’ll gladly spend the extra money to come home with packs of diapers like college students with cases of beer. NO PINS!

What do you mean cloth diapers have changed? Sure there have been remarkable advances in computer technology. Sure video games have come a long way since Pong. But cloth diapers are cloth. How could they have changed? Two words: no pins. That’s right, while we were celebrating the birth of the Internet, movies on discs called DVDs and phones the size of business cards that go everywhere; someone invented a little thing called the snappi. My wife discovered this magical item on the Internet, and suddenly cloth diapers seemed do- able. When did cloth diapers get this makeover? I must have missed it because Ty Pennington wasn’t shouting about it on a bullhorn or gathering entire neighborhoods to shout at bus drivers to move their buses.

As if finding a magical stretchy, T-shaped pin alternative wasn’t enough, thanks to the Internet, a friend of my wife found a pattern online to make cloth diapers, which opened up a whole other dimension of pin-free cloth diapering. My wife bought stylish, chic and fun material to make cloth diapers with elastic and Velcro. Our daughter has cloth diapers with paisley patterns, shoes, purses and my personal favorite-the Packers diaper for football season! When the entire state of Wisconsin turns green and gold every game day, our little girl was able to join in by wearing a green and gold with Packers logo cloth diaper! Before anyone gets the wrong idea—don’t worry—we didn’t let her soil the team colors. The material on the inside of the diaper was purple and yellow with the Vikings logo!

When I was younger, I never thought I’d grow up to be excited and knowledgeable about cloth diapers. Life can be surprising, though. For my wife and I, cloth diapers are just as easy to use as disposable diapers, a lot more cost effective and can be fashionable, too. Plus, it’s fun to amaze people with a vast amount of knowledge on the advances of cloth diaper technology. When your uncle shows you where he stabbed his thumb changing a diaper in the middle of the night twenty-some years ago, you can boast that you will never pierce your thumb and show him why. That’s right this isn’t your parents’ cloth diapering-cloth diapering now comes with bragging rights-oh yeah. And NO PINS!

-By Jason E.- Blog Contributor