My apologies to Kristin...

...and to the rest of you tired of seeing diaper ads!

One of my ongoing writing topics is going to be money-saving tips. This one is about diapers!

There are lots of schools of thought on diapering. Some look at it strictly from an economic perspective (Target brand or whatever's on sale at Sam's club), some look at it as an environmental issue (cloth diapers only: it's the cheapest route, and there are, like, billions of disposable diapers added to landfills every year. Check out this article )

For us, I kind of wanted to do cloth diapers, but I knew it wasn't feasible for us. Number one, we are always strapped for time. Number two, I wasn't jazzed about cleaning them myself, and I knew Dan was WAY less than jazzed about having the cleaned on the premesis. For those of you who know Dan, you also know what a complete understatement that is. Love that germaphobe of mine. :-) This would necessitate a cloth diaper service, which I knew we couldn't afford.

Therfore, we defaulted to disposables. We used the Pampers Swaddlers for the first month or so - these fit so well! We tried the Target brand, which was surprisingly good. Once Vi grew enough, we switched to Seventh Generation. They are chlorine-free and hypo-allergenic. We switched back to the Pampers for about a week, and Vi developed a horrible diaper rash. It wasn't like the usual diaper rash, but rather, every where the diaper touched her skin turned magenta. It got me thinking...isn't it really toxic to mix chlorine and amonia? What's the ingredient that whitens the diaper materials? And what's the ingredient in urine? Huh. Maybe, just maybe, this isn't good for delicate baby skin. Huh. We switched back to Seventh Generation and quickly started looking for the least expensive way to buy them. Here's what we found.

Babies R Us, in our town, has the cheapest in-store price (not counting any coupons or special sales going on elsewhere.)

Diapers.com offers a discount card. It's about $30 for a one-year membership, and it gets you a discount on the Seventh Generation diapers ONLY. We bought one immediately, and it paid for itself within two months. I've been ordering from Diapers.com for over a year now, and I have to say, I love it. I go online, I reorder a case of diapers and a case of wipes, and in two or three days, they arrive on my doorstep. We've had to make two emergency diaper purchases at the store since we started ordering online. One of the potential pitfalls of ordering a case (four packages) is that the kid might outgrow that size before you've used them all up. This happened to us only once, with about 10 diapers to spare. We just gave them to the daycare center to have as extras for the other kids.

A close friend of mine uses Amazon to buy her diapers. I guess they have a subscription service, where the user signs up for regular deliveries of the diapers (for example, "always ship me a case of diapers once every three weeks). The price was significantly lower than on Diapers.com, but there's the "regular deliveries" piece. I'm not a big fan of having someone else in control of when I place my order - I like to do it myself. But I think we will switch to Amazon for the next month or so because of the savings. I'll just have to do some research on the frequency of my orders with Diapers.com to see what interval I should set up.

There you have it! That's all I know about ordering diapers. I welcome any comments or other suggestions.

Oh, and Kristin, I can't wait to have some Sangria on a nude Meditterranean beach with you, then retire to our villa for some gourmet cuisine which we will prepare using German cutlery, and we will eat it seated at our gorgeous, custom wooden furniture. (See? I takes cares of yous.)