After all my kids have been throwing up for a couple of days, I put the babies in disposable diapers because I know what's coming next.
The reason I have disposables laying around though, is the huge difference it makes in my happiness. If I don't have anything to put on the babies' bottoms, but am forced to hand sew diapers out of old T-shirts and hand wash them in the freezing cold outside, then sometimes I start to feel sorry for myself, and begrudge my situation in life, despite it being far easier than the vast majority of people not only in the world today, but throughout history. But, if I know I have a silly little disposable diaper just sitting there waiting for me to give up and be just like everybody else (yes, you taste pride here ;) then I will do whatever it takes to use cloth diapers because I WANT to, and try incessantly to prove that cloth diapers are not just better for the environment, but easier and more fun as well! Well, I fantasize that if I had the perfect diaper stash and was actually organized, it would be just as easy to grab a clean cloth diaper out of the laundry basket, as it would be to find a disposable diaper.
The truth is, that the hardest part of using cloth diapers is finding the clean ones somewhere in the clean laundry mountain - or wishing that I had enough that if I didn't wash diapers twice that day, I would still have a clean diaper to find.
Fun-wise, cloth diapers beat disposables hands down. How many people do you know who drool over a chance to buy a disposable diaper?
I do find it helpful to keep the disposable diapers in the car. That compensates for my disorganization, because just pulling one out of a package would be easier than conquering the laundry pile, but the thought of having to run out to the car, gives me just that much more needed motivation.
I used to think that my kids would learn through natural consequences, and I spent hours pretending I wasn't nagging as I said things like, "I can't do all these dishes by myself and read you stories and if the dishes aren't done we won't have anything to eat the cake on, so please help out because I can't protect you from the natural consequences of not helping." It was true, but it wasn't (isn't - blush) fun. I realized that perhaps humans in general don't like to HAVE to do anything, and that whether it is another person, society, or natural forces, the result is the same - it somehow takes the fun out of it. We love choice! We are so intelligent that we create choice where supposedly there is non. It is my belief that there is always another way - a funner way!
But whether there is another way or not, it is way more fun to choose to do something, than to be compelled to do it. So instead of self-righteously trying to force acknowledgment of the stark reality of natural consequences on my kids, I find it my job to cater to their innate optimism. Doing the dishes is a completely enjoyable choice of what to do with ones time, if there is not undue pressure to think that our lives rest upon whether it gets done that minute or not.
Then I realized this was true for the rest of the world too. How much fun is a job that one feels one has to go to in order to get a paycheck to stay alive? Yet this is the story of the vast majority of employed people in this country. So many enjoyable tasks are turned sour, by making them compulsory. And it is my belief that so many useful tasks are left undone, or done poorly, because those doing them, do not enjoy them.
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