"Your Family is Better."

I just had to share this funny experience I had the other night at a church potluck. I was sitting at the table with my 2-year-old when another little girl (about age five) sat down next to me to chat. She looked at my daughter and asked, "Why does she wear that different kind of pants?" I looked at Lola's wool longies and asked, "What do you mean?" "Well, she doesn't wear the normal kind of pants like mine," she said as she pointed to her jeans.

So then I explained to her that Lola does not yet use the toilet, she is still wearing diapers. I pulled her waist band down slightly to show this little girl that the diaper was made of cloth, not plastic. I told her that the pants she wears were special wool pants that keep the wet diapers from soaking through. She looked at me with the wheels in her head spinning as she processed this bit of information. Her next response was, "So, your family is better than ours?" I was stunned that she would come to this conclusion and did not know how to respond! I just smiled at her and thought, hmmm, I'm sure that in some ways her family is better than mine. But when it comes to the kinds of diapers we choose to use on our babies, I believe my family has made the better choice.

It always amazes me that children can so easily come to the conclusion that cloth diapers are WAY better than disposables (in contrast with their parents that are not so easily convinced). Two nights ago when I talked to this little girl, I didn't give her any kind of reasons why we used cloth, I simply stated that we did. All she had to do was glance at the diaper. She immediately decided that the cloth diaper looked much better than the paper & plastic diapers that her little brother wears.

I remember a similar experience several years ago. I was watching my seven-year-old niece at my house and sneaking in a little diaper sewing at the kitchen table. My niece was fascinated with the sewing and sat down beside me to ask what I was making. I told her I was making some diapers for my son, and she said, "my mom doesn't make diapers, she just buys them at the store." I then explained to her that the ones I made were special because I could wash them and use them over and over again. The kind her mom bought at the store were made of paper, so you can only use them one time and then throw them in the garbage. She thought about this for a moment as she watched me sew. Then her face lit up as she said, "When I'm a mommy and I have a little baby, I'm going to use these kinds of diapers too, not the throw-away ones!"