Read on to get to know Emma as she gets ready to add another little Rock Star to her family. She will be sharing with us her experiences cloth diapering a newborn.
Meet Emma
Cloth Diapering a Newborn From Day One
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| Guess who's pregnant!?! |
My
first pregnancy was in Hawaii. Just before I got pregnant, I was a teacher in a
low-income school and I loved it. I had
taught 3 years of kindergarten by then and had developed a solid curriculum. My
husband and I (newlywed that summer after 4 years together) planned to get
pregnant at the beginning of the school year, so I had prepped all those little
shape cut-outs, holiday prep, etc. for the coming year to make my pregnant teaching
year the easiest possible. That summer
before school started, we had a fabulous wedding and were on the way to our
honeymoon when I got the call that, unfortunately, the Families for Real
program had been cut and since both teachers teaching it had 30+ years of
experience, I was bumped from my position, regardless of how much they wanted
to keep me (union protocol). I was to be
relocated to another school a few miles away and to teach 5th
grade. Upon returning and entering my
new classroom, I found it gutted. No
curriculum. Minimum supplies. And on top of that, on the second floor with
no AC in 85 to 90 degree year-round weather.
I went home crying. All the work
I had done to make my pregnancy easy was thrown out the window. This was going to be a very stressful
year. But I had the drive, energy, and
the determination to make it happen.
Until first trimester morning-sickness kicked in.
By the time I hit 3rd trimester, I was a
wreck. I was sweating nonstop through
all my clothes. I needed a fellow
teacher to watch my classroom while I peed every hour. I starved through the morning block and then
scarfed down my food and collapsed during my break on my classroom floor for a
nap and to relieve the elephant ankles that were forming due to standing too
long on my feet. Every night I would stay up way too late creating
the next day’s curriculum or grading papers.
Or, I would fall asleep doing them and then wake up to finish at around
3am when the heartburn woke me up again.
It was a nightmare. But I did
survive. However, my pregnancy was
anything but easy. My placenta started
calcifying for unknown reasons, my fluid levels were extremely low, and my baby
turned breech just when things started getting more hectic at school. And then, at 28 weeks, I had preterm
contractions. I had to go on unexpected
bed rest, and for a teacher, this is even more stressful than teaching to the
end. My OB got me on meds to stop
contractions and I begged to go back to school to prep for my long term sub and
get my students’ affairs in order once the meds started doing their job and
after a week of bed rest. It was the wrong
decision to make. At 32 weeks the
contractions came back, and I was on bed rest again. Then, at 35.5 weeks pregnant, the combination
of low fluid and strong contractions caused my daughter’s heart rate to drop,
thus resulting in an emergency c-section, when all I had wanted was a natural
drug-free birth. Although I ended up
with a wonderful healthy daughter, it was not the experience I had hoped
for. I had decided that I would not go
back to teaching, to the stress that may have likely caused my daughter’s
premature birth, until after my 2nd child was born. I did not want to go through that again. We, as a family, decided that it would be
best for all of us if I took time off to raise our daughter with a good start
at home, and live on minimal income until I was ready to go back to
teaching.
My husband transferred to
California to finish his PhD and by the time my daughter was 2 months old, we
flew back to the mainland. Due to all
the changes, we used disposables her first few months of life. Every day we cringed at how much waste they
created and how much money we were wasting on something that would be used for
a few hours or less and then thrown away.
We couldn’t wait to switch to cloth, and when we finally settled down,
at 3 months old, my daughter was in cloth diapers we were given or bought used
from friends. We have never regretted
our decision to switch to cloth. Now at
20 months old, my daughter is getting very close to being potty trained (one
benefit of cloth: early potty training!), but we are still using cloth diapers
about ½ the time. Due to my need for
teaching and the extensive research I have done on caring for different kinds
of cloth diapers, I started teaching a monthly “Cloth Diapering 101” class
downtown last year to help mommas of all kinds get to know their cloth diapers,
or to try out different types in our “lending library” of donated cloth
diapers. There are so many options out
there, and every baby seems to have different needs! I have found it interesting how much you need
to know to cloth diaper. And then I
found Rock-A-Bums diapers, which seemed to make it easy to cloth diaper without
all the how-to and mumbo-jumbo that takes almost 2 hours of explaining in my
class. New moms need easy, not
complicated. Especially with a
newborn! So I had 4 diapers shipped to
me to test out on my toddler, and to try as the first diaper on my soon-to-be
newborn. I can use the same diapers for
both my toddler and my newborn! How easy
and simple is that?!
Stay tuned for “The Adventures of
Professor X: Mom’s experiences during Baby #2’s life in the womb and
immediately upon exiting!” I will
continue with the changes we have made during my 2nd pregnancy, the
differences between home birth midwifery and standard OB care, a few funny
stories along the way, a surprise gift, a trial run of my new diapers on my 20
month old, and ending with the birth story of my new baby, named “Professor X”
until born! Will it be a boy? A girl?
Will I get the home birth I planned for?
Only time will tell!
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