Blog Action Day- Decrapifying your life to be greener.
Blog Action Day- Decrapifying your life to be greener.
To steal a word from my husband, I strive to decrapify my life. My husband and I both have similar goals for our lives, families and living in general. We are on the same page in the same book for many things, but when it comes to crap, it seems like we are on the same page, but in different books. I try to take crap out of my immediate environment literally; while he strives to take crap (ware) out of his and others environment virtually through the PCDecrapifier.
My husband’s website talks about his efforts to help make others virtual environment, so I’ll only discuss my efforts to make my environment greener by decrapifying the crap in my life.
I have decrapified landfills by not putting crap (disposable diapers) in there in the first place by reusing cloth diapers, I decrapify my diapers by letting by babies crap (poop) in the toilet starting at a very young age instead of crapping in their diapers, and I decrapify others crap (stuff) by recycling flannel receiving blankets to catch crap (excrement) in diapers.
Although, I don’t consider myself to be a tree hugger, many of my friends have labeled me a hippy, my husband just thinks I’m a bit nutty and my family thinks I’m going to give my children a bad complex when they get older.
I started off using cloth diapers on my first born’s 100th day. I originally did this to save our budget and to lessen the impact on the landfills. After purchasing my first few bags of diapers, I started to do the math and realized I needed a different method for diapering that wasn’t so expensive. I also had in the back of my mind memory of the aroma of driving past a dump on my way to work everyday for about a year; I realized how much crap we throw out that doesn’t have to be there. I didn’t start to look into cloth until after my daughter was born and then was overwhelmed with all the information about using cloth. You can read my other posts on diapers to see what my final decision were and how they have changed with the birth of my second child.
Reduce water consumption & Reduce time children are in diapers.
I furtherer my efforts to help conserve, I use less water for washing diapers because I started toilet training my daughters at an early. Conserving water is just an extra bonus in toilet training my girls, because it was originally purely out of sport (realizing that a baby could indeed go potty on cue), disdain for changing poopy diapers, lessening my laundry load, and intolerance for cleaning poopy diapers for toilet training them. Now that I am also toilet training baby #2, I would still say conserving water isn’t even on my list of reasons why I am using this method again and know that children don’t like to soil themselves from birth… which could get me on a soap box for several hours about how people let their children wear their unhygienic urine on themselves for hours (including me allowing my child to do this at times).
Because of my efforts to toilet train my first child at an early age, I decreased the number of washes I did per week considerable, and was able to have her recognize where her “potty” goes very early as well. We started going without a diaper at 15 months while around the home and by 19 months she was totally conditioned to use the toilet while she was awake. At 29 months she went from using 2 diapers a day to 0; however, I had already started # 2 on cloth diapers by then so my diapering days hadn’t ended.
RECYCLE what I have on hand:
Receiving blankets have worked so well for me that I have had a couple of friends give me their unwanted blanket to use. Theses seemingly useless blankets work great as a diaper, and are thin so they dry quicker than a perfold.
In the end (all puns intended), I am able to get more crap (stuff) because I spend less on crap catchers that can’t be reused, spend less on water by washing less crap out of diapers less often, and spend less on crap catchers (reusable diapers) because I reuse others blankets. Ok that last reason can be argued To be totally honest, I really don’t spend less on reusable diapers because I have an obsession on finding the best diapering system that works for me, but I do spend much less on diapers in relation to disposable diapers.