Improvised sweatpant cloth diaper OR the truth behind my #clothcommunity selfie

 

Forgive the horrible selfie, I rarely even have my picture taken, let alone attempt to do it myself, at the end of the day… rocking Christmas fluffy sleep pants, but hey, that’s life around here, I actually DID have on nicer pants before that, but my last tally of pants I can wear outside the house is 3, so I do the best I can in order to make sure I have clothes for the next day. I took this on Sunday, so after church, the jeans (yes, jeans) came off and the furry sleep pants went on so I would have something to wear on Monday….

 

The fact remains, though that somewhat like my frazzled mom-bie selfie above, I  want to have everything in order 100% of the time, but life happens. Somehow my back-up prefold didn’t make it back into the vehicle- major fail on my part. So when we got the 15 minutes away outside the mega-mart for much needed groceries (and chocolate), and went to unbuckle the baby.. yup, she was stinky. You have to realize, that would be 15 minutes back home to get a fresh diaper and no one, I mean NO ONE wants to drag 3 kids BACK 15 minutes as dinner time clicks nearer just to get a clean diaper. I hemmed. I hawed. But I was NOT going to give in and go buy a $10 pack of disposable diapers and wipes for one change. No.

 

Yes, I’m that addicted committed. The only disposable this baby ever wore was in the surgery room, and YES I am still angry at my husband for agreeing to put it on her, we HAD a diaper IN hand and the disposable was 100% unnecessary. Just like the current issue… but how to fix this problem? MacGuyver I am not, but I do have a whole lot of good old fashioned ingenuity, and after nearly 6.5 years in the diapering, feeding, sick in the middle of the night trenches, I have this stuff down. So I asked the oldest child to start looking for diaper supplies and put baby on my seat. I gave her a baby spoon to chew on- totally random, I know, so she’d stay still. Somehow there were no wipes, either, so I thankfully had a box of tissues on the floorboard. At that point I was really hoping I had a random disposable wipe because of course the dampness does help… but then ran through my mind all the chemicals, including alcohol… oh yeah, HAND SANITIZER (or hanitizer as my 3 year old calls it) to the rescue. I grabbed both of those, and my daughter handed me the Econobum cover that had miraculously made it’s way back to the vehicle (or maybe it never got used and the prefold was used for something else, that is entirely possible– but I’m digressing)…  she checked all the pockets and found no diaper, so I asked for…

 

the sweatpants.. now these are size 24 month camo sweatpants. I have a deer hunter in the family and she gave us those and they’ve been our go to for the vehicle in case of accidents ever since, and I’m grateful…but I simply folded them in fourths into the cover and got it ready for the switch.

 

So, tissues, germ-x, hmm no wetbag.. but thankfully the diaper closes up on itself enough that it wasn’t strictly necessary. Let me tell you, this was a really bad diaper and it took several wads of tissues and squirts of germ-x but I got the job done, put the diaper on, replaced the baby’s pants and then cleaned my own hands and we were ready to go– and I washed them in the store, too, just in case, because you never know.

 

I’m writing this so that maybe out there someday, some person might be wondering if they should buy the pack of disposables, and having it really grate against their nerves… it’s just to let that person know that it CAN be done. You can have ingenuity in ALL your parenting choices. You can use the materials you have. You can think outside the box and be proud. Because seriously.. I was so PROUD that I solved that problem in a short amount of time with basically no supplies and gave my baby a fresh, clean, if somewhat unusual, improvised diaper. We got our groceries, went home and were thankful for our giant stack of fluff.

 

Yes the sweatpants got washed with the diaper laundry, and those (and the missing prefold) got put back out in the truck. If something ever happens again, I guess I’ll have experience on my side. The sweatpants worked REALLY well, by the way, and I see those on sale for about $0.50 or $1.00 in some cases at the mega-stores during clearance time and probably less than that at a thrift shop, so even if you’re on a super tight budget, you really COULD get some baby size sweatpants and use them as inserts in a pinch or as a way to save.

 

Unusual, yes, unthinkable? Actually, no. It’s made me a bit more proud of myself, a bit more committed, a bit more fearless when it comes to everything. Our kids NEED fearless moms. So yes, it’s all true, I changed a diaper with sweatpants, germ-x and tissues, and I’d do it again rather than use disposables in a pinch.