Doctors, Baths, and Diapers

Can you find the baby in the clothes stack?

I remember the first time I had to take healthcare into consideration. My first job out of college. HMOs, PPOs, premiums, deductibles, in-network versus out-of-network. The possibilities abounded, and they all stemmed back to the charge that appeared on my paystub every two weeks. Now that Kelton is here, I've also been educated in FSAs (flexible spending accounts). These handy little things allow you to stash money back pre-tax in order to pay for co-pays and prescriptions. The trick is that you have estimate what you are going to need for the entire upcoming year before Christmas of the present year. Like you need something else to think about around Christmas while you're already trying to figure out why that stubborn little light won't burn on the top string of lights on the tree and where in the world did I pack our Christmas table decorations? Now we get to calculate the number of times we will and we might be visiting the doctor's office for check-ups, sinus infections, and the occasional unknown.



We took Kelton to another pediatrician yesterday to evaluate his eczema. It's taken me a month to remember just how to spell it. One of Kelton's finest motor skills accomplishments is scratching his noggin. He's very good at it, but I suppose when it itches all the time, that would be a priority on the learning scale. This doctor was much more helpful than our last, and she reassured me that babies really don't need a bath everyday. That one has been nagging at me. There's this little voice in my head that says, "Wash that baby every day!" and then there's the other little voice that says, "His ears won't fall off from skipping a day or two!" I preferred the latter of the two, and now I have a doctor's statement to back me up on this one. Washing dries out the skin, so the fewer washings the better. I don't think Kelton minds this either. Not that he minds baths, but I'm pretty sure it's not on the top of his list of fun things to do.

The other thing that is healthy for baby skin is air circulation. And as most mamas know, air circulation around the hiney means cloth diapers!! So, Kelton and I visited a cloth diaper store this afternoon, and we came home with an assortment to try. At the very minimum, my goal is to get him into cloth for the nights and most of the weekends (so basically maybe about half the time). Let me digress, remember my profile where I said I'd come up with another "plan" soon? Well, this is it! Back to the story...So, now there are more options than the cloth diapers that my grandmother used on my mom and her brothers. There are all-in-ones (all cloth, completely padded, velcro closures, use it like a disposable but don't throw it away), there are pocket-diapers (all cloth, but you have to remember to stuff it with absorbent material), there's cotton, hemp, and bamboo, there are the original cloth diapers but they come in two types of cotton, and then there are the waterproof covers that only some of them need and they abound in options too. (I'm pretty sure that was a run-on sentence) We're going to try two different types of pocket diapers and a half dozen of the regular ole stand-bys.






I also learned that you have to "prep" your diapers by boiling them for 20 minutes. This breaks down the fibers and oils - termed "stripping". So, our kitchen now smells of stripped cotton. It's a new smell for this household, and I'm not quite sure it will catch on as fast as vinegar did when I switched us to non-chemical cleaning a couple of years ago. To put that in perspective, the vinegar is still catching on!


boiling diapers

I'll let you know how this cloth diapering regime works out. It should be interesting....very interesting....