So on this most gorgeous of Sunday afternoons both my husband and my son are fast asleep. I think I need to go next door and wake my man pretty soon – he has lots of work to finish in this home stretch of school over the next few weeks. But while I am free by myself I will type.
This morning I picked up my La Leche League guide: <i>The Womanly Art of Breastfeeding </i> in preparation for my return to work. I will soon need to think of a pumping schedule that fits in with baby’s feeding regimen, and all that. Part of me wishes that I was returning to work after he starts solid foods, but this is the decision I made and I’m now two weeks away from my return. Feels pretty scary. One, to be going back and getting back into the swing of things, and Second – to be away from my boy. It is hard enough trying to put him on some sort of a schedule, I wish we could just continue to have our unstructured days . . but at least he will be used to being around other people by the time Stranger Anxiety sets in . .I think. It is funny how every time I pop open the La Leche League book a huge amount of guilt sets over me. And here I am exclusively breast feeding and cloth diapering! How could I feel guilty? For the occasional pacifier that gives us an hour of peace in the evening, I feel guilty. For the having baby sleep in the bassinet rather than next to me (I can’t even BELIEVE I feel guilty about this, considering that my pediatric training recommends against co-sleeping) . .but the La Leche League book strongly advocates for it and it happened to be the chapter I opened up today. All I wanted to know was how to start a pumping schedule that wouldn’t compromise my milk supply, and here I was putting down the book as I was reading it aloud to L, taking L to our bed and cuddling him closely and then breast feeding for about 3 hours. So crazy how that book turns even the most dedicated breast feeding mom into a guilt-ridden slave to maternal instinct. Not that I dislike the book. It is fantastic and helpful with lots of techniques shared, lots of information. But boy is it militant and to some extent making me feel very bad about my return to work!
The other piece: Now that I am returning to work we also have to figure out the whole cloth diapering situation and see if it will really be applicable to my daycare. By this point I’ve already made a considerable investment into my diapers so I would probably only need a few more diapers to make the “stash” daycare-ready – meaning that I’d need another wet bag and a bunch of more hook-loop closure all-in-ones so that daycare was comfortable diapering my little boy.
So I took an inventory of what I have so far and what I’ve paid and I came up with the grand total of $591 (at least I think it’s a grand total). Pretty steep, huh? The costs do add up and I suspect that if you are considering cloth diapering for the cost-savings aspect, I have not yet recouped my costs. I will need to go through a multiplication table of comparison but my guess is that it would take many more months of use, and I would want to use my newborn stash with a second child to truly make the cloth diaper decision cost-effective. I didn’t choose to CD only because of cost, of course- I actually prefer cloth over disposable diapers for feel, fit, look, comfort, and I have fewer blowouts with cloth compared to disposables. But the idea that I would conserve money as well as petroleum did cross my mind! Rather than calculating my own costs here I am just going to use data from the Baby Cost Calculator at Baby Center which suggest that the combined cost of wipes and disposable diapers is $92/month. (FYI, I also do have some disposables and disposable wipes as a backup in the house, which increases my total probably to about $630 to date). This means that so far I am in the red ~$350 and may recoup the cost with child #2, or if I chose to sell the diapers. I think that if I continue to CD little L at least on weekends, even if not at daycare, I should at least break even on the diapers. But my total investment cost will be higher as he gets older and grows out of some of his sized diapers. . . for this reason I think that most of my future purchases are going to be one-size diapers.
Ok, I hear the menfolk stirring . . . time to wake them up!