Typing that title just made me laugh… don’t know why, but it did. Maybe it just seems like something really funny to be writing about. Or maybe it just brings back a lot of fond memories of disposing of my son’s poo. I am sure one day when he is older and brings home his first girlfriend I will say something embarrassing like “You know, I used to clean your poo from your cloth diapers…” Anyways, I digress…

When you use a cloth diaper, what do you do with the poo?

The reason for this post is that I noticed that someone out in Google-land found my site using the search-term “Cloth diapers what to do with the poo.” An interesting search, indeed, that made me realize that in my post about cloth diapers (here), I didn’t actually explicitly answer the burning question of, “Hey, what the heck do you do with all that darn poo!?!” So here goes…

Well, you obviously can’t throw it in the garbage, as you would when disposing of a disposable diaper. So, the next best place to put it is… are you ready?… drum roll please… badabadabadabda…. the toilet!

Actually, the answer is not that simple. If it were, I would be doing something productive with my life instead of writing this blog post.

The answer is in fact a complex function of the liquidity factor of the said poo, the age of your child and the stickiness factor of the cloth diaper.

To try and put it simply, (although this is indeed an art that comes with a lot of practice and experience), here are some general guidelines:

1) Your child is a newborn: Generally the poo is runny and liquidy with very few clumps. This all just gets absorbed into the cloth, with the exception of a few small clumps. Simply place in the laundry basket or directly into the laundry machine and go wash your hands. Don’t forget to take your child off the changing table first though.

2) Your child is several months old: You get various mixes of poo at this stage, but generally the approach here is to rinse the diaper out first and then put it in the laundry basket or laundry machine. Now you really need to wash your hands, and probably go have a beer too.

3) Your child is over 1 year old: The poos at this age tend to be fairly solid and can easily be dropped into the toilet bowl just by dangling the diaper over the bowl. This is where the stickiness factor of the diaper comes into play. The Bamboozles diapers that we used were good in the sense that the poo just rolled right off of them, hardly leaving any trace poo on the diaper itself. If there is a large amount of trace poo remaining on the diaper, you can wipe it off with some toilet paper and throw the toilet paper. If the poo was liquidy, see point 2 above.

Stage 1 and 3 are probably the easiest. Stage 2 can be a bit more gross but is manageable. Just think of it this way: you will be diaper changing for a shorter period of time overall. So a bit of investment now will pay off dividends in the future.

Happy diaper changing and feel free to comment if you have any other ideas on the famous question of “what to do with the poo” hey… that rhymes… neato. Cheers folks.

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