Lily's Legacy

Last night Herb and Kathleen came over and in between the sunset ride in the convertible, the martinis, and supper, I washed and dried 47 diapers.
They have been in a cedar chest since Lily's sister, Jessie, became potty-trained. She's twenty now, so that was a while back.
They have been waiting, white and soft and functional for at least seventeen years, maybe eighteen, and it felt like treasure when I pulled them out. I didn't realize I still had so many.
When I folded them this morning, I kept thinking of how nicely they are going to fit around Lily's baby's bottom. How comfy they are going to be for him. I thought about Lily changing her baby and how she'll be an expert in three days at this business of diaper-changing. How each diaper change is an opportunity to kiss her baby, admire his perfect belly, his boy-parts, his tiny butt. How she'll so carefully clean him up and make him all cozy again, tucked into soft white cotton.
It doesn't seem possible.
But the diapers are ready and so she may have this baby at any time.
I am handing over the diapers to Lily who is about to become a mother.
And so it continues, and so it begins.

What Is This World Coming To?

I've spent most of the day in town with Lily and we bought her a new baby sling. We tried it out with a doll at the shop, handily placed there for just such a purpose. I think. I told her she could try it out at home with one of her cats. We also bought a few diaper-related articles. I am going to be giving her my own cloth diapers which I used on her and her baby-sister. Cloth diapers are that durable. The woman at the shop pissed me off because she said stupid things about cloth diapers and what you need when you use them and then she said a smart thing which was, "I never used cloth diapers so really, I'm not expert."
I said, "Well, I raised four children with cloth diapers so I am."
Anyway, I'm discovering that the use of cloth diapers which used to be something that every mother on earth could figure out and somehow managed, even the Catholic ones with fourteen children, four of them in diapers, is now something akin to rocket science. You have your liners, you have your covers, you have your diaper grippers (because god knows you can't use a diaper PIN because what if you stuck your baby through the leg and killed her?) and you have your velcroed diapers and you have your hemp diapers and you have your, well, I don't know.
I was like, "What the fuck are you going to use a liner for? When you use cloth diapers, if the baby pees or poops you change them. They are not like the disposables which you only have to change once a month. Okay?"

Here is how to use cloth diapers:
Get three dozen prefolded cotton diapers. One size fits all. Really.
Get two diaper pins if you can find any of those fuckers. The ducky ones are especially nice.
Get some plastic pants. Good luck with that, too.
Put the baby on the diaper, folded to his or her size. Fasten the diaper. If the baby needs some warm pants on, put the plastic pants over the diaper and under the warm pants.
When the baby pees or poops, take off the wet or soiled diaper, clean the baby's bottom, kiss her tummy lots and lots and then put a new diaper on.

Jesus, people. It's not that hard.

You don't need a pee-pee shield which is a piece of plastic junk you put OVER your baby boy's pee-pee so that when you change his diaper, he doesn't pee in your face because THAT MIGHT KILL YOU! But here's the thing- if you change your baby right after he pees, he probably doesn't need to pee again right then and will not pee in your face, THUS KILLING YOU. Frankly I don't know if any of my babies ever peed WHILE I was change their diaper. Ever. Once. And how do you keep a baby boy still enough to keep that pee-pee cover over their tiny wee-wees?

Maybe they would cover that in the diaper class you can attend because nowadays they have CLASSES in using cloth diapers. Classes. Where they show you all the options. The diapers which come with covers and velcro, the different size diapers, the HEMP diapers, the diaper liners.
Whatever.

I actually almost filled out an application to work part-time at this store. But then I asked what the salary was and babies, it was not good. And then I realized that if I worked there, sales would probably go down about 70 percent because I'd tell everyone they didn't need all that crap and I'd get fired.

And that's my story for today.
We did get a very nice sling. It's blue. Lily's baby will look fine in it and be cozy next to his mama or daddy. I do like that idea a lot. Maybe I'd be good at selling slings.

And now I have to get ready to go to a baby shower. Lily's shower which is being given by her coworkers. There is a Twilight theme. I'm not kidding. Lily already told me to be nice.
I told her I'd just sit there and roll my eyes and keep my mouth shut.
I'll try.
I promise.
I hope the cake is good.

Not Quite A Rant, More Like A Theory

I'm pretty sure I've written about cloth diapers before and God knows I've written about childbirth but I'm too lazy to go back to see what I said and if I don't remember, maybe you don't either.
The above picture is one of my favorites and yes, it's a lousy replication. Sorry.
But that's a shot of HoneyLuna when she was a tiny little blond thing waving at her beloved Paw-Paw who was surf fishing. She is wearing, as you can see, a soggy, saggy cloth diaper. It was probably wet from ocean water and I probably just took it off of her and let her run around naked after that picture was taken. I don't remember but that's something I would have done.
When my first child was born, the Pamper had just been invented and it was a nasty thing made of paper and plastic and there was no way I was going to put that sort of uncomfortable thing on my baby. I wouldn't have worn it so why should he?
I used cloth diapers then and I used cloth diapers for all four of my kids, although I will admit to using disposable at night when the kids got older and the products got better. But for the most part, I used the old fashioned cotton diaper, prefolded and fastened with diaper pins.
How barbaric!
And yet, it worked for me.
Of course, this meant I had to rinse out baby poop in the TOILET and I had to wash all those diapers and dry and fold them. For the first two children I had no dryer and depended on line drying and somehow, that worked too.
This was just what you did back then. There were plastic pants that went over the diaper to prevent leakage when the child was wearing something over the diaper (like corduroy overalls- the cutest thing in the world that a child can wear- trust me on this) or if we were going to be somewhere that if a leak occurred, it would be awkward, such as the store.
No big deal.
And no, the cloth diapers didn't prevent leakage the way disposables do.
And yes, I had to change them EVERY TIME THE CHILD PEED OR POOPED which meant that on many days, I probably changed at least a dozen, maybe more, diapers.
Nowadays, the way they make those disposables with that magical stuff in them that takes the pee and turns it into a gel or something, you can get away with probably three changes a day. Maybe a week. I don't know.
But I do know that every diaper change was a chance at a little face-to-face interaction, a hug, a tickle, a kiss, a running-of-the-chubby-little-legs-like-a-bicycle, a giggle, a belly raspberry. In short, what we might call mommy (or daddy)-baby quality time that beats the hell out of a Baby Einstein video. All in the name of a dry bottom.
I wonder if anyone's done a study to determine if the decrease in the number of these interactions are affecting our babies' development.
I doubt it.
The diaper companies certainly wouldn't pay for it.
And that is the main reason I think cloth diapers are superior to disposables. Is that crazy?
I mean, yes, I think cloth is better for the environment and it's got to be a hell of a lot cheaper. Of course it's more work and you have to actually deal with baby poop on a whole different level if you rinse out the diaper in the toilet and flush it, which is how poop should be handled, if you think about it, rather than just folding that little plastic package up and throwing it away.
Which is far yickier if you ask me than flushing. In the long run, at least. Think of all the baby poop in landfills.
Or don't.
But you know, this is how we are these days- we don't deal with things on the level that people used to. We don't raise our own food or butcher our own animals or pluck our own chickens or make our own clothes or chop our own wood. We don't like to get our hands dirty or deal with blood or poop or pee.
Or pain.
And I'm pretty much down with that.
But I wonder how it's affecting us. Technologically, we are so much farther advanced than we are biologically. It's one of the reasons obesity is so prevalent. We're still wired to need just a few more calories than we would expend in obtaining food energy. Think of how hard people used to have to work to get a meal on the table. Between the growing or raising of it, the hauling water, the chopping wood to cook it on, the hauling of the wood, etc., you were damn lucky if you could get enough to eat to offset what it took to get it from the ground to the body. Or from the woods to the body.
And now, we only have to walk from the closest parking space we can find to the door at Publix, into the store and around it to gather what we need to bring home and pop in the microwave and cook it. We can even buy prechopped vegetables, for God's sake! Who doesn't have the time to cut up an onion?
Well. That's another rant for another day.
But all of this is leading me up to childbirth which we now go through painlessly as a matter of course. I don't know who doesn't get an epidural these days.
And I just can't help but think that there's something wrong with being in heavy labor and watching television at the same time.
Not that I think that pain is absolutely a good thing- I do not.
But in the case of childbirth, I have come to believe it has a lot to do with the way a mother feels about her child, which is that as soon as the child is born, the pain is over, and the vast and amazing relief from that pain is associated with the child, making that baby all the more precious on some level that I'm sure our ape-mothers would understand, even if we don't.
Anything that takes THAT much effort to produce is worth watching out for and protecting.
But we don't honor that anymore and in doing so, we lose a lot, I think. We lose the knowledge we gain when we have gone through childbirth unmedicated about how strong and powerful our bodies are.
If there is anything more empowering than delivering a normal-sized infant without drugs, I have yet to experience it.
So. From cloth diapers to natural childbirth.
They are related. And breastfeeding is in there too. Because all three of these things take a hell of a lot more effort but somehow, some way, they all three help foster a connection between a mother and a baby that nothing else can.
We have evolved as mammals in such a way to ensure that babies get born and nurtured and raised to adulthood so that they can have their own babies.
And that's my theory and I'm sticking to it.