crunchy parenting

Photo by koalazymonkey

Keeping a well stocked diaper bag for your toddler is the first step towards having a smooth outing. Try to keep yours always stocked with the following non-perishable items:

• 2-3 diapers
• Refill pack of wipes (at least half full)
• Natural hand sanitizer (like CleanWell) for occasional use
• Changing pad or receiving blanket
• One small (fist-sized) unusual toy for emergency toddler breakdowns
• Compact extra clothing, like a t-shirt & leggings (sometimes stashed permanently in the car)
• Pocket camera
• Extra emergency medications (ie. if your child has allergies, etc.)
• Pocket first aid kit (or a travel one kept in the car)

If you always start the day with a bag packed with the above, then you only need to add the following when you’re getting ready to leave the house:

• Sippy cup filled with water
• Extra water bottle filled with water (for you, or to refill zippy)
• Piece of fruit
• Small bag of dry snacks (crispbread, freeze dried bananas, etc.)

I try to stay in the habit of restocking the non-perishables as soon as we come back home. Add diapers, check there’s enough wipes, offload camera pics and put the camera back, etc. If you’re keeping some of the less-often used items (extra clothing, etc.) in the car, be sure to check that once a week.

What do you keep stocked in your diaper bag?

I’m hooked on using Nature Babycare diapers. I’ve used a variety of cloth and disposables on my now-two-year-old, and as far as disposables go, these are my absolute favorite diapers ever. Compared to other reviewers, I’ve had few incidents with leakage – all were caused by “installation” error, or a diaper that was unusually waaay overdue to be changed. I’ve never accidently ripped a diaper opening the package – these feel pretty sturdy* to me in spite of the more paper-like covering. (I have ripped other brands of European paper disposables, OTOH.) My toddler sometimes plays with the tabs and I don’t think she’s ever torn a tab off or anything. I also love that the tabs are re-positionable; they’re not just glorified stickers, like some other brands of ecofriendly diapers.

Made in Sweden, Nature Babycare diapers are touted as biodegradable, compostable 100% chlorine-free disposable diapers. We haven’t tried composting any of the wet ones, but we do try to minimally package up the used ones when throwing them out, to give them a chance to breakdown more easily.

I also love that they don’t really smell like anything. This may be a no-brainer if you’re coming from other ecofriendly diapers or from cloth, but many commercial diapers have some sort of fragrance added to them to give off a fake baby powder smell. It drives me nuts, and I love that Nature Babycare doesn’t do that with their disposables.

But perhaps the best thing for us is that something about these particular disposables are really much more breathable for delicate baby bums, and between these and cloth, we’ve only had to deal with diaper rash twice, ever. I didn’t really appreciate this until a few international vacations where I ran out of the stash I’d brought with me, and had to fall back on using conventional plastic diapers. Ugh. It felt like a constant battle to keep the slight redness or moistness at bay. Now I pack enough to bring the extras home with us!

What are your favorite diapers and why do you love them so?

It’s my 31 Days To Build A Better Blog Challenge:Blog of the Day Day! Thanks to Nirvana Mamma for all the tweet & comment love, and to all the lovely mamas and bloggers stopping by to say ‘hi’!

I know it’s a bit long, but for all the new visitors, I thought I’d share something a little more personal today…

Recently, I was touched and moved by Adriel’s post over at the Mommyhood Memos, on her birth experience. While she had been hoping and planning for the typical crunchy birth experience, a la midwives and such, her little bundle of joy was discovered to be breech two hours into labor and she was whisked away to the land of.. well, something that wasn’t quite planned.

I love her post because it was so close to my own experience in many, many ways. I was in labor with Spice for about twelve hours BEFORE pushing. Two hours into pushing, my water still hadn’t broken and we start discussing whether they should break it, or if we should transfer. I start crying, since I DON’T want to go to the hospital, and other than being tired, I feel fine and the baby still seems to be fine. So while I’m upset that we’re thinking of transferring rather needlessly, my water breaks and things start moving again.

Three hours later, I’m still pushing and downright exhausted. The midwives can see her little head every time I push, but then she just slips backwards again. We talk about transferring to the hospital again and the idea that they can try a vacuum-assisted delivery before a c-section has me hopeful.

The car ride is torture. Only 20 minutes, but I’m still needing to PUSH every few minutes and trying to stop that is like trying to stop an earthquake. I could have sworn I was screaming and howling in the back of the car, but both the spouse-unit and midwife claim I was pretty quiet all the way.

We get to the hospital and it’s everything I hate. The attitude of the staff, the horrible smells of disinfectant, the fact that they make me SIT IN A WHEELCHAIR to get to the room when all I want to do is walk along and squat through the pushes, for chrissakes! They make me get in bed, strap an IV to me, and my OB/GYN comes in, cool as a cucumber. He tells me we’re going to try this once (with the baby suction cup thing) and if it doesn’t work in five minutes, we’re doing a c-section and would I like an epidural? I cringe, but I’m freakin’ bone-weary and after a few seconds of eye-contact conversation with the spouse-unit, we agree: a) if this delivery works, it’ll be too fast for the baby to get any possible effects of it, b) maybe it’ll help me summon up the energy from god-knows-where, and c) if it doesn’t work, I’d need it for the c-section anyway.

The anethesiologist comes in and he becomes the epitome of what I hate about conventional medicine and birth practices; he’s full of snarky comments about “failed homebirths” and thank God I wasn’t paying attention, or I’d have thrown something at him and ended up in the psych ward.

Not long later and my OB/GYN comes back in and says something cheery like “Let’s do this” and suddenly I’m aware of lying on my back with my legs up, classic laboring-mother-in-the-hospital-pose, with all these faces staring at me and telling me to push: the doctor, some nurse, the spouse-unit, the midwife, my doula. I start pushing and they tell me again to push and I argue that “I AM pushing” and they’re practically yelling that I’m not. To my horror, I realize that it’s the epidural, that where before I could feel the bowling ball in my hips, now I can’t feel a damn thing. It’s a truly shocking thing to feel that you’ve lost control of a part of your body so fast.

I think that’s when I panicked. All I could think of is the part of our childbirth class where we prepped ourselves emotionally for what a c-section might be like. I have the horrible vision in my head of being laid out crucifiction style and that’s all it takes for me to start pushing so hard I feel my eyes starting to pop out of my head.

And that’s it. Spice slipped out into the world — upside down! At some point in labor, she’d flipped around “sunny side up”, and not even the doctor had noticed. No wonder she’d been stuck for hours. Everyone breathed a sigh of relief, including yours truly. She cried from across the room where they were weighing her, etc., and they wrapped her and brought her straight back to me to nurse.

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Ironically, the hospital was ready to discharge me an hour later, but their policy is that all babies be cleared by a pediatrician first, so we ended up having to spend the night and wait for one in the morning, just for that. Bleah. Even funnier was arriving home around noon the next day to find that the spouse-unit had lost the house keys. But I had my little wonderchild and the endorphins were still going, so other than having to wait a bit longer for a shower, I was a happy mama!

To this day, I’m so very aware of all the ways things could have gone differently, despite my most valiant and crunchy attempts. I may be insanely crunchy sometimes, but I try to reserve passing judgement for the mamas that truly know better and still make bad choices.

On the other hand, my feeling is that if you attempt to educate yourself about childbirth & parenting, to make a better life for your child, I don’t think you can be held responsible for “acts of God” or things that just don’t go as planned. That’s just life, and like falling while surfing, you just have to roll with it and make the best of it.

So many carriers out there, so little time to research! Here’s the cliff notes version for busy parents-to-be. Most slings fit into one of three categories: pouch slings, wraps, and soft-structured carriers (SSCs).

Pouch sling (Mamma's Milk)

Pouch slings

These are often the easiest for new parents to get the hang of. Imagine a strip of cloth sewn together to form a circle. You drape the circle across your body (from one shoulder to the opposite hip). The circle is crafted in such a way that now there is a pouch across your chest/belly. This is where the baby goes.

The ones without buckles or adjustors are usually sized-to-fit, which means that different caregivers may need separate ones. But the downside to the adjustable ones is that they may be uncomfortable. The same goes for padded slings – some people like the padding, others find it bulky and unnecessary.

Pros: easy to use, compact, great for newborns, quick for hip-carrying toddlers, often no buckles to adjust or get in the way, can be breastfeeding-friendly

Cons: some babies outgrow these FAST, may be uncomfortable if sized wrong, badly placed buckles or fasteners, hard to use for middle-aged babies (not newborns, not toddlers), rarely “one-size fits all”

Some well-known pouch slings: Hotslings, Mamma’s Milk

Woven wrap (Vatanai)

Wraps

A wrap is basically a piece of cloth, usually ranging from 2-5 meters. You can wrap the cloth around your body in various ways to create a variety of ways to carry your baby (on your chest, on your back, on your hip, etc.)

The materials can vary greatly, from thick cottons that are great for cold weather, to breezy gauze for carrying your baby in hot, humid climates.

Pros: no buckles to dig in, infinite uses, newborn to toddler, breastfeeding-friendly, longer wraps can fit many caregivers, long-lasting, many have high resale value

Cons: challenging learning curve

Some well-known wraps: Moby Wrap, Girasol, Didymos, Storchenwiege

Soft-structured carrier (Angelpack)

Soft-structured carriers (SSCs)

SSCs come in all shapes and sizes, the basic idea being that of a square cloth, with varying kinds of straps. The baby/child sits in the square portion, and you can tie/strap them to your front or back. (Some variations that use simple straps without buckles make it possible to wear your child on your hip, too!) Mei tais and pod egis are other forms of SSCs, called “asian baby carriers” (or ABCs).

SSCs can also come with buckles, pockets, padded straps and more bells and whistles. Picking the right one is entirely a matter of personal preference, both yours and your child’s.

Pros: quick learning curve, can be easy to use, often adjustable, often very comfortable for older babies & toddlers

Cons: sometimes limited ways to carry, buckles/straps may be uncomfortable, can be bulky, maybe be tricky with newborns, not usually breastfeeding-friendly

Some well-known SSCs: Angelpack, Beco Butterfly, BabyHawk, Pikkolo, Ergo

Look for local baby-wearing groups or clubs in your area. Your local La Leche League (however you feel about them) might have more information on local babywearing groups or stores in your hometown. (If you’re in Los Angeles, be sure to check out Koala LA!)

For those curious about what I have stashed in my closet, I’ll happily tell. I’m the proud owner of a lovely 4.6m Green Tea Girasol woven wrap, a 4.6 Vatanai Maruyama woven wrap, and a wonderful organic Lotus AngelPack SSC. They’ve been around the world with me & Spice, and I can’t wait to use them with the new baby this winter!

Grab a cup of tea, set your timer for a 15-minute break and enjoy some linky goodness below. (Cookies optional.)

* “*Set a Course*”:http://www.chrisbrogan.com/set-a-course/ // Chris Brogan’s excellent post on making sure you know where you’re going in life.
* “*Homemade Liquid Hand Soap*”:http://tipnut.com/homemade-liquid-soap/ // An easy-peasy recipe for making your own. As soon as I get some glycerin, which is also handy in “making your bubble solution”:http://www.creativekidsathome.com/activities/activity_5a.html.
* “*When Pro-life is Anti-family*”:http://www.bella-kai.com/christian-parenting-toddlers/ // An insightful article on Florida’s “Choose Life” license plate fund and how funding is skewed towards would-be mothers who choose adoption over parenting.
* “*What to search when you’re expecting*”:http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/07/what-to-search-when-youre-expecting.html // Hilarious Google-produced clip on a new parent-to-be researching their future life with a baby. [1 min.]
* “*The Occasional Dad-O-Graphic*”:http://dadographic.blogspot.com/ // Simple yet entertaining graphics of one father’s summary of the highlights of parenthood.
* “*Five Myths About Drinking Water*”:http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=89323934 // Do you really need 8 glasses of water a day? How about “more water = less toxins”? Answers here.