Thankfulness Challenge

After a very quiet October from me, I am going to join the masses and do the Thankfulness Challenge. If you haven't already heard about it, the challenge is to write every day through the month of November (or at least to Thanksgiving Day) what you are thankful for. And, since today is the 2nd, I'm already a day behind. I kept thinking about it yesterday and saying that I would do it later. Well, later turned into today! So, I'll try and get another post done this afternoon to make up for it.

Day 1: (Yesterday) I was thankful for cloth diapers. Yes, this is a strange one! Yesterday marked the beginning of Diaper Decision's Great Cloth Diaper Hunt. Until this year when they skipped May, it has been a bi-annual event since 2004. I started participating in November 2005 or May 2006, I can't remember which. The idea behind the hunt is that numerous Work At Home Moms hide an icon on their site and you are required to visit the site and find it. Some moms give you hints and some leave you on your own. And, there is an extreme category of sponsors where the icons are incredibly tricky, for instance, when the icon is at a link only found when you hover over a period at the end of sentence. So, most of my internet time yesterday was spent browsing websites looking for the icon (and therefore, I did not spend my internet time blogging). There are tons of really great prizes, none of which I've ever won. The Great Cloth Diaper Hunt is what got me interested in cloth diapering. I had always thought that cloth diapering was a pretty disgusting concept, but through my first hunt, I kept reading about it and seeing so many different diapers that I got more and more interested. In May 2006, I bought my first cloth diaper on eBay. By August of 2006, I was cloth diapering Kadin full time in FuzziBunz. And, except for the first couple weeks of Jeriah's life and our two trips camping in the Colorado mountains, Jeriah has probably only worn 20-30 "disposies". A few months ago, I tried to figure up how much we had saved using cloth and it was close to $2,000 just for Kadin. Jeriah would be close to that, too, and his number will continue to increase before he is potty trained. Yes, you do have a huge initial start up cost (which I was lucky enough to get in when FuzziBunz was clearancing one style and moving to the next, so they were deeply discounted.) And there is the on-going cost of laundry, but I'm certain that I haven't used $4000 worth of soap, water, and electricity in four years! Plus, nothing is cuter than a big fluffy diaper bum!

Digital Scrapbook page of Kadin's first cloth diaper.
(Ignore the harsh shadowing on the paper squares, I was new to digital scrapbooking, too!)

Jeriah with his red, white, and blue FuzziBunz in July 2010, I was trying to win a contest!


Another contest, with Rockin' Green Detergent where I won a free bag of their soap!