Cloth Diapers: Our Experience

I LOVE the concept of saving money whenever I can. When I found out that I could save money on diapers by sewing my own, I knew that I had to try it. After sewing and using cloth diapers for the last 6 months, I wanted to review my experience with them and whether or not I think its worth it to use them.

Our Experience:

I actually really like our cloth diapers. I have a pretty good system of cloth diapering during the day, but we also use disposable diapers when we go on road trips, hiking trips, and at night when my daughter goes to bed. Ella is a morning pooper (sorry for tmi), so it works out for us that we rarely ever have to deal with soiled cloth diapers. When we do get that occasional soiled diaper, it is pretty simple to clean: you just shake the diaper out in the toilet, scrape the diaper with a scrub brush, and throw it in the diaper pail. I rarely have to touch anything icky with my bare hands.

BTW, there are these handy little tools that you can buy that hook up to your toilet to spray off soiled diapers. I never bought one, but I have heard that it makes cleaning messy diapers a WHOLE lot easier!

As far as leaks, we hardly have any with our diapers; we did have leaks in the beginning because Ella was too small for the diapers I made and the pee leaked from the leg opening, but she's grown into them and we don't have that problem anymore. The type of soaker (the fabric pad that is inserted into the diaper and holds in the pee) really helps with this, and buying quality soakers is key. I will get into what soakers I use later on in this article. We have 16 diapers that I have made total, and wash and dry them about 2-3 times a week.

The Benefits of Using Cloth Diapers:

Financial
We have saved a LOT of money by cloth diapering Ella. (We could save a lot more though if we chose to exclusively cloth diaper our daughter, but our active lifestyle doesn't always allow us to do that.) After you make the initial investment of sewing or buying your own cloth diapers, the only cost from there on out is just the cost to wash and dry the diapers.

Environmental
Cloth diapers have very little environmental impact. Disposable diapers, on the other hand, do. A child can potentially go through 9,000 diapers in the course of 30 months if you are exclusively using disposable diapers (that's 10 diapers everyday for 30 days for 30 months). That's a lot of trash to sit in a landfill somewhere! For me, this is not the main reason why I chose to use reusable diapers, but it is kind of like the cherry on top knowing that I can help cut down some of the environmental waste out there.

Health
It is not just a myth that cloth diapers help prevent diaper rash! My daughter rarely gets diaper rash now that we use cloth diapers.

Cuteness Factor
I love cloth diapers because they are so much cuter than disposable diapers. You can make them in whatever pattern you want, and can mix and match diapers with tops to make cute outfits! Plus, you don't need a diaper cover when you have such adorable diapers!

Resale Value
One nice thing about cloth diapers is that they hardly lose their value. Once your child has outgrown them, you can resell them to recoup some of the money you spent, which adds to your overall savings. This also provides environmental benefits as the diapers would be reused and recycled, instead of being thrown into a landfill.

The Cost of Making the Diapers:

For me, I spent about $137 on everything including fabric, soakers, tools, etc. If you want a breakdown of what those costs were, read below. If not, feel free to skip to the next section!

Initially, I spent $60 on materials to make cloth diapers. I got all of my supplies 40% off at Joann's (they were having a promotion) and used a $5 off coupon. Everything I bought included:

- $20 on plain, white waterproof "Outer" fabric (2.3 yards)
- $10 on Dri-Wicking "Liner" fabric (2 yards (we got the end of the bolt)
- $6.59 on plastic snaps
- $12 on the snap pliers
- $7 on the Fold Over Elastic (don't buy it, its only decorative, and I haven't even used it yet)
- $6 on an instruction/pattern book
- $3 on flannel fabric to make Soakers (1 yard total)

I could have made 16 white, plain cloth diapers from just the above materials, but I made a couple and realized that they were BORING! Actually, my husband and I saw some cute fabric on the clearance rack at Joann's, and he convinced me to make some cute diapers that had a pattern to it. Also, I didn't have a waterproof diaper pail liner, and I couldn't wait a month to buy one on ebay from China, so we bought some more stuff. We spent about $27 extra on:

- $9 on plain, white waterproof "Outer" fabric (1.3 yards)
- $18 on an arrangement of cute, patterned fabric (about 8 yards total)

I made the diaper pail liner out of the waterproof fabric, and still have extra to make a few more diapers with. Likewise, I have a few yards of patterned fabric that I am waiting to use for when I have to make a larger size of diapers when my daughter outgrows the ones she's using.

Other costs:
- $50 for 24 charcoal bamboo, 5 layer antimicrobial soakers

I made a few soakers with the flannel fabric that I had bought during my initial trip to Joann's, tried them out, and they FAILED MISERABLY. So, I ended up buying bamboo soakers on eBay and LOVE them! They are extremely absorbent and do exactly what they are meant to do! You can find soakers anywhere online - amazon, ebay, etc. Sometimes you can find them in maternity consignment shops as well. They come in a variety of materials and layers, but I suggest buying the soakers with the most layers as possible.

Is it worth it?

The question you are all probably wondering is, is it worth it to cloth diaper my child? And to that, I would say, it depends! Cloth diapering is not for everyone, and that's ok! I don't find it much different than using disposable diapers, except it is a little less convenient to have to wash out soiled diapers in the toilet and launder them. Because I had the opportunity to save money, I love to sew, and I have no problem cleaning the diapers, it was a no-brainer for me to try to make and use the diapers.

Alternatively, you can buy cloth diapers on-line or at maternity consignment shops, but they are more expensive that way. I say if you want to try them out, buy one or two and see how you feel about using them. If its not what you want to do, then you haven't spent too much money, and you can probably re-sell them online pretty easy.

If making cloth diapers sounds like something that you would like to give a go at, there are pattern books at any craft store and there are free diaper patterns on pinterest. I had a lot of fun making my cloth diapers, and will be making more in the future when my daughter gets bigger!

Palatki Ruins in Sedona, AZ

What better way to spend a day off than by getting out of the house and going to see something new? Well, for us, it was new, but in reality, what we were going to see was something a few thousand years old.

Many people know Sedona, Arizona for the beautiful red rock landscape, but what many don't realize is that there is a rich native American culture that is almost as old as the rocks themselves. In fact, there are many native American ruins in the Sedona area, a shadow of a people that once called the land home. One of the ruins that C and I visited before he started school this August was called Palatki, meaning "Red house," in the Hopi language. Palatki is the site of the largest cliff dwellings between AD  1150 - 1350 built by the Sinagua people. To visit the ruins, we had to make an appointment for a tour. We called that day and were able to get a spot with no problems.

Our trip to Palatki took us 30 minutes outside of Sedona on a dirt road in the middle of the Sedona outback. The path wasn't extremely rugged, but it definitely made me wish we had a 4 wheel drive vehicle to traverse the landscape with. We were surrounded by large junipers and towering red rock vistas.

We arrived at the visitor's center and were greeted by friendly park rangers. They instructed us on how to access the cliff dwellings and gave us wooden walking sticks for hiking up the mountain to the area. The hike was only one quarter of a mile and was not bad at all with a baby; we had a hiking backpack for Ella, and she rode in it very contentedly.

Making our way up to the cliff dwelling site was pretty mind boggling thinking about how the Sinagua people would frequently climb the mountain every day, most likely multiple times a day, to travel between their shelter in the cliffs and their farms in the valley below. (The picture above shows the valley where they grew their crops thousands of years ago, taken from below the alcove where the pictographs were located). I couldn't imagine myself having to go on a hike (not that I would mind) to access every resource I need like water and plants for food or for building materials. We are pretty lucky that we can turn on a faucet and have our water so easy!

The tour at the cliff dwelling site was very interesting. We were not allowed to enter the cliff dwellings to prevent damage to the site, but could see from the outside how they were made with bricks chiseled from the sage stone mountains. There was another site towards the west of the picture below of cliff dwellings, but we were not able to access that site due to severe deterioration (aka, some parts of the ruins had collapsed making it extremely dangerous to enter).

Our next stop was to the site of a ceremonial alcove in the mountains towards the northwest of the visitor's center (about a half mile from the cliff dwellings). There, there were many pictographs (some of which dated 6,000 years ago, way before the time of the Sinaguans), of lines, squiggles, animals, and one that resembled Princess Lea from Star Wars (see below left). In reality, the pictograph was most likely created by someone from the Hopi tribe as the figure has hair that is like that of Hopi women (see below right of a picture of a Hopi girl). Apparently, the area had been inhabited by not only the Sinagua people, but also people from other tribes as well throughout a period of hundreds of years.

All throughout the alcove on the cliff walls were hundreds of these lines that had been etched into the stone. We discovered that they were a result of someone taking drugs (which would have been ceremonial to the user) and trying to translate what they saw in their world that they were transported while they were under the influence. All I can say is, don't do drugs, kids.

One of the newest additions to the alcove area was a shelter built by a man named Charles Willard. In the 1920's, at the age of 65 after his beloved wife passed away, Willard discovered the area and constructed a stone shelter there as well as started an orchard. In the picture below, you can see how he used the cliff face as a natural wall to build upon, basically using the same technique as the Sinaguans to build their cliff dwellings. Likewise, in the top left part of the picture, you can kind of see a concrete box on top of a mound of stones; this is what Willard used to collect rain water to use for drinking, cooking, and bathing. Pretty ingenious.

After we had thoroughly explored Willard's shelter and the alcove of pictographs, we gave ourselves a little tour of the visitor's center museum and took off. We had also wanted to make it to Palatki's sister site that was located 4 miles away called Honanki, but it was too late and they were closed by that time. However, we had a great time at the Palatki Heritage Site! It was interesting to learn about the native American culture in the area and to get a feel for what it must have been like to live in Sedona thousands of years ago. We loved our experience there, and will most likely return to visit Honanki in the near future!

Mount St. Helens Day Trip

   

C and I lived in Washington for a few months in between the time we graduated from BYU in December 2014 and the time he started professional school in Arizona in August 2015. During this time, we got to visit many different parts of Washington and enjoy living in such a beautiful state.

One of our favorite places that we visited was Mount St. Helens, the infamous mountain known for its volcano that erupted in 1980. It was only a 3 hour drive from where we were living, so it was a very do-able day trip for such a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. We normally only drive to places that are 1 to 2 hours away as its hard to travel long distance with a baby, but this trip was totally worth it!

Let me just say, driving from the west park entrance of Mount St. Helens into the valley at the base of caldera, was AMAZING! The blast in 1980 had leveled hundreds of acres of forest and had dumped hundreds of tons of soil onto the valley beneath it. As you drive into the park, you see that the landscape is pretty much the same as it was after the eruption in 1980. There was much of the mountain that was still bare, and on the mountains outside of the volcano, hundreds of leveled trees looked like spilled toothpicks in the distance. It was awe-inspiring, fascinating, and somewhat eerie, all at the same time.

Cameron and I first stopped at the Weyerhouser free visitor's center, which had a very impressive museum. They had a moving video and exhibit that demonstrated what it was like for people who had been caught in the volcano's eruption and what was being done by Weyerhouser after the eruption to harvest the fallen trees. We had a picnic in the sun (notable, because there are hardly any sunny days in Washington), and enjoyed the cool summer day. Ella enjoyed playing in the grass, but didn't know what to think about it at first.

Outside of the visitor's center was a small hill in which you could climb for a scenic view. From there, we could see how the volcano had caused a giant landslide into this valley. Now, a river snakes through the new land and is home to wandering elk.

After leaving the visitor's center, we reached Johnston Ridge Observatory, named after the scientist killed on the ridge during the eruption. We didn't have much time at the observatory's museum, but instead, we spent our time hiking. There are miles of trails along the base of the volcano and up onto the volcano itself. My husband had hiked up to the top of the caldera when he was in Boy Scouts, but that was a multi-day hike. We only had time for about a 5 mile roundtrip hike, so we chose to start on the Boundary Trail #1 from the Johnston Ridge Observatory towards the Truman Trail #207.

Our led us east of the observatory up onto a ridge where we could see into the caldera better. It was very scenic along the path: towards the east was a hillside covered in red flowers and fallen trees, remnants of the 1980's blast, and towards the south was Mount St. Helens, in all its natural glory.

Eventually, the trail led to the side of a steep mountain with a narrow trail snaking along its edge, a section of the path called Devil's Elbow. We started to take it and maybe went 1/4 mile on it, but I was afraid of its sheer gravely drop offs (I'm not afraid of heights, but I kind of am), and how late it was getting, so we decided to turn back.

On our way towards Mount St. Helens, we had seen a little mom & pop restaurant called Patty's Place in Toutle, WA that advertised good ole' American food and Elk Burgers. We decided to stop there on our way back home and try an Elk Burger for ourselves for dinner. They were a little pricey, so we split one and had a peach cobbler. We sat on porch outside and overlooked the river below. It was a very beautiful evening with a slightly chilly breeze (summer can still be cold in Washington!), but it felt great to sit down and enjoy the evening after hiking. The food was great, and the elk was a tastier, leaner version of beef. Inside the restaurant were pictorial memorials to Harry Truman, the grumpy old man famous for defying authorities and staying in his home with his cats  during the eruption instead of evacuating. We left Toutle and made it home by midnight!

Overall, we had an amazing trip to Mount St. Helens, one that I would easily travel across the country for if we had the opportunity! We had actually gone into the wrong entrance to the park (there are multiple, and they don't connect, so choose wisely lol). We had meant to visit the Ape Caves (a series of underground tunnels carved out by the flowing lava of the volcano) which is on the south side of the mountain, but didn't realize that we would have had to drive another few hours to get there. Looking back, it worked out really well for us, and we had a fun time anyways. We will have to save the Ape Caves for another trip. ;)

Culture Pass Presents: Deer Valley Petroglyph Preserve

One of the nicest things about living in Arizona is the culture pass. It is a pass you check out from your library, and it gives you FREE admission to a participating museum in the Phoenix area. You can only check out one culture pass every two weeks, and it is usually good for two people. If you have two adults in your family, you can have a free activity you can do once a week. (Kids under a certain age are usually free).

Last week, C and I visited the Deer Valley Petroglyph Preserve, one of the participating museums. It features a small indoors museum as well as a 1/4 mile trail outside that snakes along the base of a small, boulder-strewn mountain. About 1,500 of the boulders in this area are covered with petroglyphs, carved rock designs that were created by the Native Americans that inhabited the area hundreds and hundreds of years ago. It was pretty amazing to see the different types of petroglyphs that were there and to try to reflect on what they meant. For example, in the picture above, there are many petroglyphs on the boulder that resemble deer. Could it be that the artist wanted to carve deer to influence a future hunt, or could it be that the image represents a hunt that took place prior to the carving? There are many different possible meanings, but no one knows for sure which one is correct.

In the Deer Valley Petroglyph Preserve, you can see many more petroglyphs like these of all different shapes and characters. Some petroglyphs are close to the trail and are easy to see, while others are quite a ways in the distance and may be hard to distinguish. For this reason, I suggest bringing a pair of binoculars. You cannot leave the trail to get a closer view of the petroglyphs higher up on the mountain.

Although the Deer Valley Petroglyph Preserve is not a large museum and will take no longer than a couple of hours to see in its entirety, it was still quite a fun place to go to. C and I went in the morning around 9:30, and had no problems with the heat, but make sure you take plenty of water just in case. Because you will be walking along a gravel trail, it is not stroller friendly.

Hours: Tuesday - Saturday, 8 am - 2 pm (summer hours: May-September)

On the third Saturday of the month during the summer, the Deer Valley Petroglyph Preserve is open to the public for FREE! However, when we visited the museum, we were the ONLY people there (we went during the week). I would highly suggest going on a week day if possible as we were able to take our time at the petroglyph sites and were not pushed through the museum.

How I Lost 35 Pounds After Pregnancy

I gained quite a bit of weight when I was pregnant with my daughter, and I am proud to say that most of it is gone. When Ella was born, she was only 5 lbs 10 oz, so I was pretty surprised that I had gained a total of 37 lbs during my pregnancy. I was expecting her to be a little chunky baby with adorable tire rolls resembling the Michelin tire man, but nope. Somehow my body had been greedy and took all of the late night brownies that I thought were going to be delivered to my daughter via umbilical cord and delivered them right to my thighs.

Likewise, after I gave birth, I was expecting to lose a bunch of weight immediately. Many people had told me that you lose at least 10 lbs during delivery (with the baby and placenta), but that was not my experience. I only came home 4 lbs thinner, and I am sure that the hand and foot catering I received in the hospital did not help. For some reason, I had gained some weight after I gave birth, and I definitely looked a lot puffier for quite awhile afterwards. I'm going to break down how I lost my marshmellow physique into two sections: exercise and diet.

My husband and I had been running together before we got pregnant, and once we found out we were pregnant, we pretty much stopped. I was really afraid that I was going to hurt the baby, so we started walking around the neighborhood for exercise instead. In retrospect, we probably could have kept running, but I was being super careful.

After we had Ella and I could start exercising again, we started running again (in the beginning of January of 2015). At first, it was just running a mile every other day, and walking a couple of miles the days we didn't run. I had not been running in awhile, so I had to slowly build up my stamina. The next month, we had added .5-1 mile onto our run, and kept increasing the distance each month. By May, (6 months after I had Ella and ), I was able to run 4 miles, although we wouldn't go that far every time since C had work that we had to schedule our time around. Usually we were running around 6-10 miles a week, and walking maybe 6-8 miles.

Now that C is in school (he just started dental school this August), we don't have as much time as we'd like to run that frequently, but we do walk a few miles around our neighborhood every chance we get and go hiking somewhat frequently.

Now, as for diet, at first I wasn't very cautious about what I ate. This probably slowed down my weight loss drastically. I had an app that tracked calories and this helped quite a bit, but it was too much work and it was helpful at first, but not worth it to me. Instead, I took the principles that I learned from my calorie counter, and consumed food based on that. For example, I learned to:

- Use measuring cups to measure out my cereal and milk intake. This helped to only eat one serving and not pour myself too much milk.

- Buy almond milk instead of regular milk for cereal. Almond milk has 30 calories vs. regular 1% milk can have up 110 calories for a 1 cup serving. It also has more significantly more calcium than regular milk as well, so it is really good for women looking to prevent osteoporosis. For the first 8 months, I only drank 1% milk, and took calcium supplements since I was cutting back on dairy and this was my only form of calcium.

- Buy foods with less sugar.  I check sugar levels on nutrition labels almost religiously and stay away from anything that has more than 9 g of sugar in it. You would be SURPRISED by how much sugar there is in stuff. Like Dr. Pepper has 40 GRAMS of sugar in it! FORTY! (Not that I drink the stuff, I only drink diet coke if I have a soda, which is pretty rare). But I used to have a yogurt everyday for lunch, and I didn't realize that every time I did I was pumping 26 g of sugar into my bloodstream. I stopped t

- DRINK WATER. It is free, and it doesn't have anything in it that you have to worry about (eg: calories, fat, sugar..). The stuff is amazing!

- Cut back on how much you eat, NOT what you eat! Counting calories made me learn that I can eat more of the good stuff if I eat less of something else. Life is too short to stop eating foods that you enjoy, so eat it! Just don't eat as much of it.

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By exercising and changing various things about my diet, I was able to lose 35 lbs in 10 months. I am so close to reaching my goal of getting back to my pre-pregnancy weight. Once I reach that goal, I want to lose another 20 lbs (hopefully), but I'm going to take that one step at a time. :)

Payson Labor Day Hike

On Labor day, C and I decided to take a drive to the woods to escape the heat. From our house, Payson, Arizona is only a one and a half hour drive, and most of that is going through a beautifully scenic landscape. Going north to Payson from Phoenix on highway 87, you pass Fountain Hills, an Arizona's epicenter of wealth and the tallest fountain in the world (which, if you're lucky, you can see from the road). On the right in the distance are the Superstition Mountains, which host hikes of all skill levels (I recommend the Lost Dutchman trail), and off towards the north of the Superstitions are Four Peaks, one of the most famous mountains in Arizona for the fact that it is featured on everyone's license plates. This is one of my favorite drives in Arizona. You start off in the desert valley surrounded by saguaros of all shapes and sizes, and eventually climb into a juniper and pine forest with spectacular mountain views.

We had an amazing drive up to Payson, but our time after that was a bit rough. C and I got to the Horton Creek Trail #285 and realized we had forgotten our water bottles at home. Luckily, a family offered to share a few of theirs with us, and we were able to continue hiking. The weather was very mild, and there were lots of overcast clouds around us. This should have tipped us off that we were about to get some rain, but we had come so far that we didn't want to turn back.

We started the hike and went about 2.5 miles before we got hungry. There was a little creek that ran next to us, and we decided to cross to the other side and have lunch on a fallen tree. C had his Keane's and could just walk through the creek, but I decided to take my shoes off so I wouldn't get them wet and cross barefoot. The water was VERY cold! We enjoyed watching the water and the blue moths (or butterflies) that fluttered around us. It had started to sprinkle and we were halfway through our water supply, so we decided to turn around.

Our view up the creek from our lunch spot.

On our way back, the rain picked up more and more, but we were enjoying our hike and were slightly used to hiking in Washington where it rains most of the time, so we weren't phased. It wasn't until we saw lightning and heard thunder crash right above our heads that we freaked out and started jogging down the trail as fast as we could. Poor Ella was even scared by the noise and commotion and had started to bawl. The lightning and thunder followed us for a bit, and I couldn't help but pray aloud for our lives. We were on top of a hill that had sparse tree cover in some spots, so we felt pretty vulnerable to the lightning that was pretty close to us. We slipped and slid through some thick mud on the trail, but we eventually made it back to the trailhead safely.

There was a Tonto Creek Fish Hatchery that I had gone to when I was a kid that was close by, so we decided to visit that before leaving the area. We had fun feeding the trout that were there and marveled at how big and beautiful some of the older Rainbow trout were in the hatchery's show pond. By this time, we were soaked with water and there was a breeze, so we were very cold. But we still managed to stop at the Paleo Site on our way back into town, and had fun digging around for fossils. It took a bit to find a good specimen, but we found a sedimentary rock with fossilized sea shells and other types of barnacles in it.

We had seen some semi-bad traffic on our way up into the forest, but for some reason didn't think that it would get as bad as that. Our mistake! It seemed like everyone in the valley had gone up to the forest for Labor Day and were coming home the same time we were. It was 12 miles back into Payson, and we spent that entire drive stopping and going 5 mph at most. It took us more than an hour to get to town, and by then, we were frazzled by the traffic. After stopping to have dinner in Payson, our drive back to the valley wasn't so bad, though.

We had a lot of fun on our trip up north, but definitely learned our lesson about going out of town on holidays.