Dirty Diapers

I do a little bit of laundry every day.  If I didn't, our home would soon be overrun the growing mounds of dirty clothes like some very scary domestic horror show.  Maybe we ought to save ourselves a bunch of work (and money!) and start a little family nudist colony.  I digress.  It's still winter around here and much too cold to run around naked.

Today I opened the door of the washing machine and pulled out a load of diapers.  As I transferred the clean, fresh-smelling cloth diapers into the dryer, a new thought struck me.  This way my last load of cloth diapers.

I started my diapering business 20 years ago next month, and have been in nearly constant demand ever since.  I still remember those first few loads, loading the diaper pail and Jay's mesh laundry bag and the baby into our '67 Cougar to drive to the laundromat.  Good old college memories.  I have had no dearth of customers, except for one short period when we took a short break and retooled for the serving of female clientelle.  No, I've had great job security.  The chores have been constant - being on-call 24/7 - but not usually very particularly demanding.  The was always the occasional messy work emergency, but even that left plenty of spare time between jobs.

There was a time, a couple of years ago, when I had customers lined up three deep, but that has petered down to just working the night shift.  Everyone is happy and dry during the day, but Georgie has had some nighttime challenges.  When I got him dressed this morning and took off his night diaper, I realized that he had been basically dry for the past week.  Nighttime potty training is not a big deal around these parts, so I don't stress it much.  I praised him and gave him a treat - a single jelly bean, and he was thrilled.  Our trusty diaper pail was full, so I hauled it into the laundry room to wash that load of diapers.

Georgie will wear training pants with plastic pants to bed tonight.  I'm not ready to do away with his plastic pants yet - they do catch a little bit of an accident, and they make a distinctive crinkling sound that lets me know my little ones are sneaking around out of bed.

And now the diapers are clean and dry, white and fluffy.  What will I do with them, I wonder.  Use them for dust rags like my mother did with our old, tattered cloth diapers?  Cleaning the car cloths?  They make great stain-appliers when I am refinishing furniture, but I have an awful lot of them.  Anyone interested in a big, twin-sized batch of plain-Jane, old-fashioned cloth diapers?