Waste Containment - Part 1

So, Liz wanted me to become "obsessed" with cloth diapers.

I think I can do that.

First of all, I am fairly confident that using cloth diapers is less about saving money (probably won't happen), saving face (already derided) or saving the planet (maybe a little) than it is about how depressed we get when we see the industrial-sized boxes of Huggies at Costco. 228 diapers?! Per box!? How many of those would we need? How fast would we burn through them? The implications are frightening. Will I have to get one of those orange flatbed carts just to go diaper shopping? I'd rather be loading it with TVs and 48-packs of socks than with disposable padded bum-covers for catching my kid's loads.

Alright, cloth diapers it is... but where do I start? I have a few leads on brands from friends who have blazed the trail before me, but I like to research. Googling "cloth diapers" yields too many results to handle, though I look through the shopping links.

Green might be a good choice.

A few familiar brands show up: BumGenius, GrowVia, TrendLab... Wait, what the hell? There is a cloth diaper brand with "trend" in the name? This is troubling. Maybe white towels with diaper pins is the way to go. Sure, you'll risk stabbing your bundle of joy each time you wrap them up, but don't they absorb blood just as well? There are 7 billion people wandering the earth, and the majority of those born before 1970 didn't have the option of disposable diapers. Hell, I doubt the majority of the world's population had diapers at all.

But I digress. I am initially intrigued by the bumGenius One-Size Cloth Diaper 4.0 Snap because of the sheer amount of iteration it must have taken to get to a fourth major release! I wonder what new features and bug fixes will arrive with 4.1?

I wonder if the 4.0 label isn't just clever marketing aimed at 30ish tech-obsessed geeks, hell-bent on having the latest gadgets. Uh, oh - that's me. This might take a little longer than expected.