Dear Sensitive Readers,
Please don’t e-mail me about the title of this post. I know you don’t like it. Be forewarned that the following post uses the terms poop, poo, crap, rump, and butt in excess.
Love,
Katrina
This edition of My Cheap Trick is geared towards people who regularly change diapers; therefore, if you are not in this category, what follows will probably be TMI and you won’t want to read it.
For those three of you left, do you ever feel horrified to the core of your being at the V-A-S-T amount of money that is being essentially flushed down the toilet? Oh fie upon the cash we spend to keep our butts, and the butts of our family, pristine. TP, diapers, and baby wipes can easily cost my family $40 a month, even when I do scout down some some pretty good deals. But despite the savings I do find, butt-wipes add up. I’ve even lately resumed my sporadic use of cloth diapers to help mediate this expense. Occasionally I’ve made my own baby wipes, which weren’t too bad.
Yet even at my granola-est with cloth diapers and homemade wipes, I cannot bear to use the cloth wipes (aka: washcloth) method. Sometimes it just takes TOO MANY wipes. It is definitely worth something to me to be able to throw away the wipes.
AND yet . . .sometimes I cringe at the number of wipes it often takes to rid my darlings of their putrescence.
You know how the toddler’s poop periodically takes on a grainy quality, or residually stinks so that limitless numbers of wipes cannot remove the smell. You know how even the nicest, faux cloth-like wipes cannot seem to effectively purge Darling Baby’s bum of that trash heap smell and perpetually clinging crap.
I have found a fix.
Step One: Get some scented Baby Oil Gel. I am using Johnson’s Lavender. Perhaps lotion or plain oil would work as well; I don’t know. Before this BCP (Buttwipe Conservation Program) epiphany, I hadn’t the faintest clue what conceivable use baby oil had for babies. Even baby lotion is a bit of a mystery. Who is slathering up their children in oil? Whose children are out parching themselves and having their brand new skin dry up? When I get my slippery kids out of the bath, the last thing I need to do is grease them up so that I am even more likely to drop the squirmy little lumpkin. But I digress . . . Now there is a use for that particular unused item from the baby shower gift basket. (It suddenly occurs to me now that perhaps the entire world of mothers has long known this trick and never shared it with me, in which case, I apologize for the redundancy.)
Step Two: Do the preliminary poop removal wipe. This is the step where you remove the majority of the poo. Usually this can be done with one or two wipes.
Step Three: Instead of using wipes 3-12 for subsequent attempts at rump cleansing, apply a chickpea sized dollop of the baby oil gel to the second or third wipe (depending on how much of the sandbox your baby consumed and then pooped out).
Step Four: Smoosh the wipe in half to slightly distribute the gel on the wipe.
Step Five: Wipe the bum with the gelled buttwipe. The slicked-up wipe cleanses, moisturizes and deodorizes all in one delightful step five.
Step Six: If necessary, (but probably not), repeat five. Then marvel at how lovely your pumpkin’s rumpkin looks and smells with a mere two, possibly three, wipe cleansing.
Step Seven: Rejoice at the nickels and dimes remaining in the bank rather than being lost for the futile expense of buying more butt wipes.
There you have it. Butt-wipe Conservation begins with you. Don’t miss you chance to be a part of this movement!
(Ha! 🙂 That pun was actually accidental, but now I totally crack myself up!)
Ha! I’ll join this movement too in a few months… Have you had any rash issues? I would think the scented oil might be risky for sensitive skin, although I guess just plain baby oil would work, huh?
I have had NO rash issues, quite the opposite. Instead of having to scrub the buttock raw to remove the grainy poo, the oily jelly stuff just slides it right off. AND, since you are not really supposed to use any rash creams with cloth dipes, this works great. The oil gel leaves a nicely conditioned skin without being so oily that it rubs off on the cloth dipes and affects their absorbency. Baby Anika is my guinea pig on this process and her skin actually is quite sensitive, but I’ve had no problems. She isn’t a newborn though . . . and I do avoid the more “delicate” areas with the gel wipe. 🙂
No wonder my mom just came in my room and gave me a “conservative estimate of the number of diapers” she had changed with her 5 kids!