When the Diaper Pin reined supreme...

JaniceM said:
When one of my kids was little, I had an idea- and wondered if anyone else ever thought of it: disposable diapers with a little gadget that works similar to those old-fashioned mood rings, so the Mom could easily see if the diaper needed to be changed without taking it off.
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OMG, you are a hoot, Janice! LMAO! :)
 
Marg said:
LOL! A pacifier. :)

Crazy what everyone calls them, I've hear them called everything from binkies, to pacifiers, to suckies, to soothers. :)
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Oh. Around 2 decades ago I knew a young couple with a 2-year-old child, and the child always had one. Was the first time I'd ever seen a pacifier. These days it seems almost every baby or young child has one.
 
Ruth n Jersey said:
Marg my grand kids are 9 and 11 and my daughter had every modern convenience known to man. Even some sort of battery operated diaper contraption that automatically bagged and sealed the dirty diapers. She wouldn't know a cloth diaper if one hit her in the head. lol
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Haha. Actually those diaper containers were great.
The women I baby sat had one of these and they were great. Total miraculous contraptions.
New age moms had it pretty good comparatively speaking.
 
JaniceM said:
Well, I don't know if the products have changed in recent decades, but the way they were then the tape would often tear the diaper, and couldn't always be reattached if the diaper didn't need to be changed. So I thought it'd be a useful addition.
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I totally remember! I remember pinning an occasional disposable diaper when I used to babysit, because the sticky tapes would loose their stick, or get stuck to the outside plastic of the diaper when I'd pop the diaper open to check it, and a piece of the diaper plastic would be left behind on the tape, so I'd break-out the trusty ol' diaper pins, and would sometimes even put rubber pants on over the diaper if they needed pinning.
 
JaniceM said:
Oh. Around 2 decades ago I knew a young couple with a 2-year-old child, and the child always had one. Was the first time I'd ever seen a pacifier. These days it seems almost every baby or young child has one.
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Back in the day when I was babysitting, it was nothing to dip a cranky child's soother (pacifier) in a little honey before giving it to them.
 
JaniceM said:
For the ladies who used cloth diapers:
with only one baby in diapers at a time, my mother said she used to wash 3 dozen diapers each day by hand. Is this accurate- or is it more like "I walked 10 miles to school, uphill, through 8 feet of snow, to get to school"?
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Whoops-a-daisy, missed the one baby part the first time I replied. Yep, I'm with Ruth, even double diapering and changing the baby 8-9 times a day, diapers used at the end of a day would be in and around the 20 mark, which is still a lot of diapers.

Those 20 diapers probably seemed more like 100 diapers to your mom, washing them by-hand.
 
JaniceM said:
Seriously, you're not making that up? :eek:
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I didn't bother with the photo because it looks like a regular garbage can but this is part of the description. I think it goes for $65.00 on Amazon.
  • The only diaper pail compatible with both rings and snap, seal & toss bags
  • Includes a bonus 1 pack of the TOSS Disposable Diaper Pail
Funny, I used a regular small outdoor plastic garbage can and put decals on it. The hubby was being very thrifty. He said we can use the pail outside after the kids didn't need it anymore. My mom took pity on me and bought a regular diaper pail . I was so happy. lol
 
Keesha said:
And didn’t kids often get diaper rash from the cloth material?
My neighbours mom still washed diapers using one of those old washing machines that had the rollers that squeezed out the excess water. Then she hung everything up either out on the line or down the basement. It looked like brutal work. My life was a breeze in comparison.
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I think we could call that "Old School."

My mother got a "modern" washer in the late 50's.

I once rented an apartment from an 85 year old in Bellingham Washington. One day he asked me to help him move one of those old wringer washers to the back of his truck so that he could haul it to the city dump. I want to tell you that thing was really heavy and getting it up the stairs from his basement was a struggle. I was really impressed at how strong that old guy was.

Cloth diapers hung out in the sun were pretty well sterilized, especially in the South West.
 
Pecos said:
I think we could call that "Old School."

My mother got a "modern" washer in the late 50's.

I once rented an apartment from an 85 year old in Bellingham Washington. One day he asked me to help him move one of those old wringer washers to the back of his truck so that he could haul it to the city dump. I want to tell you that thing was really heavy and getting it up the stairs from his basement was a struggle. I was really impressed at how strong that old guy was.

Cloth diapers hung out in the sun were pretty well sterilized, especially in the South West.
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Yes, old-school it was. wasn't until the early 70's, when my mom got her first automatic washing machine, up until that point washing was done in her old-fashioned wringer washer. I helped her wash LOTS of diapers!

Right you are, natural sunshine not only helped sterilize the diapers, it worked wonders in bleaching out the stains.
 
UGH, just the thought of diapers makes me cringe. My youngest two are 11 months apart (the doc changed my birth control to a lower strength because of all the heart problems in my family and it DID NOT WORK). So, I had one big baby and one little baby for quite some time before either could walk or get out of diapers and bottles. And, I had the added delight of having a wringer washer at the time (didn't mind the clothesline, but good grief, did it ever eat up a bunch of time washing diapers every other day. Yep. All cloth. Never even heard of disposables at the time. Wouldn't have had the money to buy them anyway.
 
Marlene said:
UGH, just the thought of diapers makes me cringe. My youngest two are 11 months apart (the doc changed my birth control to a lower strength because of all the heart problems in my family and it DID NOT WORK). So, I had one big baby and one little baby for quite some time before either could walk or get out of diapers and bottles. And, I had the added delight of having a wringer washer at the time (didn't mind the clothesline, but good grief, did it ever eat up a bunch of time washing diapers every other day. Yep. All cloth. Never even heard of disposables at the time. Wouldn't have had the money to buy them anyway.
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I'm with you, Marlene, I shed no tears when the last of the diapers came to an end in our house.

Being as old-fashioned as I am, I wouldn't have seen to using anything but cloth diapers, and grandma (my mom) made it clear at the very start, if I was planning on using Pampers, I was not to call her up if I needed a sitter. Needless to say grandma got her wish, cloth diapers and rubber pants it was.
 
Marlene said:
UGH, just the thought of diapers makes me cringe. My youngest two are 11 months apart (the doc changed my birth control to a lower strength because of all the heart problems in my family and it DID NOT WORK). So, I had one big baby and one little baby for quite some time before either could walk or get out of diapers and bottles. And, I had the added delight of having a wringer washer at the time (didn't mind the clothesline, but good grief, did it ever eat up a bunch of time washing diapers every other day. Yep. All cloth. Never even heard of disposables at the time. Wouldn't have had the money to buy them anyway.
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Mine are 10 years apart! :D
 
My babies were early 80's models and wore disposables. I had a couple of dozen cloth diapers as "emergency backups." With my first baby, we tried a diaper service; we just put the dirties in a covered can and the service would pick it up and deliver fresh clean ones weekly. That only lasted about a month, though. Quickly changed to disposables only!!
 
C'est Moi said:
My babies were early 80's models and wore disposables. I had a couple of dozen cloth diapers as "emergency backups." With my first baby, we tried a diaper service; we just put the dirties in a covered can and the service would pick it up and deliver fresh clean ones weekly. That only lasted about a month, though. Quickly changed to disposables only!!
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Good on you for keeping a couple dozen emergency cloth diapers on-hand in the event you needed them.
 
My daughter was born in 1970 when we were living in Turkey and though cloth diapers were in good supply at the AFEX (base store), disposal diapers only came in spurts and not a lot at a time. Even though they were pretty bad back then as we have discussed, I always wanted a box or two of them on hand.

The "call" would go out that a shipment had come in (by jungle telegraph, no cellphones back then.....heck, nobody even living on base had phones, never less those out "living on the economy"). Hordes of women would descend on the AFEX like zombies who had just gotten a whiff of fresh brains and fight to the death for that last box. "PAMPERS! PAMPERS! PAMPERS!" If we had had torches in hand, we would have looked like the villagers storming Frankenstein's castle. "PAMPERS! PAMPERS! PAMPERS!"

All this for something that wasn't much better than a layer of paper towels wrapped in waxed paper.

We traveled a fair amount and we'd have a suitcase that was for nothing more than disposable diapers. I would rip the innards out of one diaper and add it to another one. Properly constructed, that could get us through the 2 1/2 hour ferry ride to Istanbul.

At home, of course, it was nothing but cloth didies and rubber pants.
 
jujube said:
My daughter was born in 1970 when we were living in Turkey and though cloth diapers were in good supply at the AFEX (base store), disposal diapers only came in spurts and not a lot at a time. Even though they were pretty bad back then as we have discussed, I always wanted a box or two of them on hand.

The "call" would go out that a shipment had come in (by jungle telegraph, no cellphones back then.....heck, nobody even living on base had phones, never less those out "living on the economy"). Hordes of women would descend on the AFEX like zombies who had just gotten a whiff of fresh brains and fight to the death for that last box. "PAMPERS! PAMPERS! PAMPERS!" If we had had torches in hand, we would have looked like the villagers storming Frankenstein's castle. "PAMPERS! PAMPERS! PAMPERS!"

All this for something that wasn't much better than a layer of paper towels wrapped in waxed paper.

We traveled a fair amount and we'd have a suitcase that was for nothing more than disposable diapers. I would rip the innards out of one diaper and add it to another one. Properly constructed, that could get us through the 2 1/2 hour ferry ride to Istanbul.

At home, of course, it was nothing but cloth didies and rubber pants.
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Love your story, and especially love the part as to how you liken the many mothers actions to that of zombies! Perfect mental image as I read your story! :)

Brilliant of you to come up with the idea of padding one diaper with the absorbent material of another!

We made a few road trips when a couple of ours were little, and I can still see it now, them sitting in the backseat of the car in their white rubber pants and double didies. Dear husband would pull the car over periodically so I could change the babies, then back out on the open road again for another hour or two before another pullover was due.

Plastic bread bags were my best friend for such occasions! :)
 
Cloth diapers are the bees' knees for wiping down a guitar after playing. Been using them for many years and keep a stack of them handy. Apologies for going a bit off topic but thought you'd like to know there's still a place for the lonely cloth diaper.. ;)
 
HazyDavey said:
Cloth diapers are the bees' knees for wiping down a guitar after playing. Been using them for many years and keep a stack of them handy. Apologies for going a bit off topic but thought you'd like to know there's still a place for the lonely cloth diaper.. ;)
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Good on ya! :)

You bet, 100% cotton diapers make for the best wiping, dusting, polishing cloths ever.

P.S. Not off topic at all. So nice of you to share. :)
 
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