November 25, 2012
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diapers and wipes
I feel like we've settled a bit more here now. We don't exactly have a social life here on the island, but I'm not exactly a social butterfly anyway. Back in the city we made occasional trips out to have dinner with friends and what not, mostly on the weekends, but for the most part we're still doing what we've always done. If anything I feel like I do more now productive things like keeping the house clean, doing lots laundry, and basically keeping the space just so so that I can enjoying being in it. Unfortunately we've run out of wood for our wood stove and we're having a hell of a time finding any to buy. I don't think we thought about it early enough. We should have looked at the wood back when we moved in and thought, We should buy more for the winter. Now everyone's out of seasoned wood that can be used now it seems. It totally blows because the wood stove heats this place like nobody's business and it's a much cozier warmth than electric. I find that with the baseboards it gets cold before it warms up again. The thermostat doesn't really maintain the heat very well.
Speaking of doing lots of laundry and that's because my mother in law hooked me up nicely with some cloth diapers. I am completely converted to cloth. I will only use the disposables I have for overnight trips somewhere. I still use disposable wipes, but I want to switch to reusable wipes as well. I mean, why not? I'm already doing a load of diapers, why not throw cloths in there for clean up as well? I just bought a Costco sized box of refills though. So I could switch now and have a shit load of wipes for traveling...or I could just use them up and then switch to cloth wipes. Or I could try selling them. Salt Spring has its own mini craigslist. I could list the wipes and sell them for $15 or something. At any rate, I'm ready to go with the cloth wipes whenever because I have a bunch of wash cloths that I never use and if I need more I can cut up a receiving blanket or two to make more since I don't really use those either. I just need to search online for a solution I can soak the cloths in that's good for wipes.
Ok, so, I ended up going out and getting a few things I needed for reusable wipes and now I'm using them! I found a webpage with various solution recipes so I put one together that uses olive oil, baby wash, and essential oil. The two oils that are used the most are lavender and tea tree and I actually found a bottle of EO with both combined! So I added several drops of that to the solution I made. It smells nice, but we'll see if H's skin reacts to it or if I like it. The great thing about the page is that I can experiment and find the one that works the best. Some of them call for Dr. Bormner's Castille soap and it's at the grocery store, but I have so much baby wash that's going to take me forever to get through so I'd may as well use that up.
Anyway I'm excited to cut back on garbage. Even though I still have all those disposable wipes, if they are the last wipes I ever buy (save for small amounts for traveling once these are gone) I'll greatly reduce the amount of garbage from diapering all together. If I can get rid of the need for a trash can by the change table that would be awesome.