I don’t cloth diaper my kids. Go online and search ‘cloth diaper vs disposable diaper’ and you’ll find a myriad of pros and cons for each method. Cost, skin care, health concerns, environmental concerns, convenience, sanitation, and on and on. Personally though it came down to the simple fact that folding laundry is my least favorite household chore and if I could avoid folding a couple of extra loads a week then I was going to do it. So for the last 3 years of parenting the only times I touched cloth diapers were to wipe spit-up off baby faces. (Those Gerber cloth diapers make nice absorbent burp cloths for sure!) That was until today.
Today I forayed into the world of cloth diapers. Not for the child you would think either. Nope, Emilie is still happily strapped into a pair of Huggies. The cloth diapers were for Jack. I guess you can’t really call them diapers either. They are actually cloth training pants. Flips, to be be exact.
I would rate Jack as 80% potty trained. He still has two big issues to conquer before I call him 100%. The first is, well, the second….he doesn’t do bowel movements in the toilet yet unless you catch the signal and get him on the toilet before he goes. The second issue is nighttime. He wets the bed almost nightly when wearing regular underpants. We’ve tried cutting off liquids a few hours before bedtime and making several trips to the potty before bed. Still, without fail, he always seems to wet the bed sometime between midnight and 3am.
His pediatrician said this is totally normal, many children his age just aren’t physiologically developed enough to get the signal to wake up and go to the toilet. It may be normal, but getting up and changing sheets every night got old about 3 months into the process so we started putting Jack in pull-ups at night. The downside is I have no idea when he’ll stop wetting the bed and I don’t want to keep buying pull-ups. One pack is similar in price to a pack of diapers but you only get about half the number of pull-ups. I was bemoaning this to my sister (who is dealing with the same issue with her son) and she said, “Why, don’t you try Flips?”
Long story short, I did. My Flips training pack (1 cover & 5 inserts) arrived last week. So far they are working just fine. Washing the inserts is no worse than washing a pair of wet underpants. The cover can be washed and hung over the shower bar in the morning and is dry and ready to go by bedtime. Jack likes them too….he even has a special name for them, which brings me to the ‘flop’ part of this blog post.
The pants are adjustable for size and the first night he wore them Jack and I were in his room while I fiddled with the snaps and tried to get him to stand still so I could get the fit right. Jack was fidgeting and when I finally got the fit right I playfully smacked him on the hiney and said, “Okay big guy, go show Daddy your sexy pants!”
Why “sexy pants” is beyond me….it just popped out of my mouth. I really should know better by now too. Of course he’s going to repeat the one thing I’d rather him not say, he’s a 3 year-old after all. Well, he goes trotting out the living room hollering, “Daddy, Daddy!, Look at my sexy pants!”
He’s been calling them his ‘sexy pants’ all weekend. Way to go on that one Mom….. My saving grace, until I can get him to call them something else, is that it sounds like ‘sucky pants’ coming out of his mouth. Still it could be a little awkward to explain ‘sucky pants’ to anyone he decides to tell.
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