5 years ago if you had told me that there was a community of moms on the Internet who spend a good deal of their day discussing cloth diapers I wouldn’t have believed you.  At that time I didn’t spend a lot of my day on the computer.  I was fresh out of college, a newlywed, and working a crummy job while trying to find a better one in a depressed economy.  I didn’t have time for socializing online.

When I got pregnant with my first son suddenly the Internet was my full time hobby- I started obsessively looking for anything and everything related to babies and pregnancy.  I didn’t know how deep I would go into the Internet but it welcomed me with open arms.  It was on a Due Date Club that I learned about modern cloth diapers.  Suddenly I had a new obsession.  I honestly have no idea how to describe it but I was sucked in hard and fast.  I was also interested in other things related to babies, but this one resonated with me on many levels and the fact that I HAD to research in order to make my case to my husband meant I did a great deal of looking around on popular websites from the time.

In the span of a few months I went from knowing nothing about modern cloth diapers to being almost consumed by them.  My husband thought it would pass and that I would tire of the laundry, my Mother-in-Law feigned interest as I showed her my carefully crafted starter stash consisting of lots of used bumGenius 3.0’s, a few Happy Heiny’s, some terrible WAHM diapers from Ebay, plus many prefolds and covers.

I’m telling everyone this because it is very hard to understand how the community around cloth diapers exists… and how anyone would or could care enough to participate in it.

We discuss an article of clothing that holds pee and poop.  When you think about it, sounds crazy right?  I mean, my entire blog is mostly based on cloth diapering.  Also crazy.  How does one find enough to talk about that there are over 1,000 posts and over 200 videos?!

Like every other product out there, cloth diapers are constantly changing and evolving and moms want to know more about that.  First time cloth users are confused by the terminology (another surprising fact about cloth diapers is that there is such a wealth of terms and abbreviations to learn) and about the conflicting information about them.  There is no ONE website that people should visit.  Each website has different advice, different perspectives, and a different focus.  We are lucky that there is so much information available and so many platforms to discuss cloth diapers.  It is a double edged sword however, because too much information can be overwhelming to new parents and I’ve seen it backfire and turn families away from cloth because they just don’t want to wade through the thousands of websites.

Through my work and my early months of research I met people that I’m still friends with.  When asked what could an online forum or group focused on cloth diapers possibly have to talk about I would say “everything.”  The topic might start with cloth diapers but the conversation always evolves to cover other aspects of parenting.  Friendships are forged because in many cases cloth diapering parents have a shared spectrum of interests.  Sometimes they don’t, and that’s ok too.  Many of my closest friends online have come from the cloth diaper world, and many of us are done with using diapers but we’ve continued our connection because we started on our parenting journey at the same time.  Even some of my readers are finished with diapers but they still check in on this blog because they shared that same journey and started reading my posts when our babies were in diapers.

It isn’t always easy to explain my “job” to those who ask.  Even I have a hard time saying my blog name without laughing… yeah… it is a funny name.  Had I known I would have to say it out loud when I started this website I may have chosen something different.  I still wouldn’t change my path in life, and my involvement with this wonderful community of moms and dads.  We are all doing this cloth diaper thing for different reasons and yet we can all come together to do really great things and have meaningful conversations that go far beyond what diaper is on the bum.