Toddler just says no to cloth diapers

My son is addicted to disposable diapers.

Now, he is two and a half, so it's typical for him to be opinionated, I realize. But I wish he'd chosen something else. Then again, he has chosen plenty of things. So I guess I just wish this wasn't one of them.

I'm no cloth diapering guru, but we have been using Fuzzi Bunz for most of his life, and most of the time. When he spent so much time nursing at night, though, around 10 months old, he started leaking and waking up cold. Changing a tired baby's entire double-layered outfit (and sometimes the sheets) at 3 a.m. during the winter was driving me batty, as if I wasn't already sleep-deprived enough from being sole food and teething comfort support all night.

So that's when we went to disposables at night. We even had to do Pampers for a while as the Seventh Generation just weren't cutting it. We are back to chlorine-free but haven't gone back to cloth, even though we probably could. I figure we'll soon be much more vigilant about making opportunities to pee on the potty. We've got #2 down, for the most part, and I think once we're all ready for the other, we'll know, and then we'll go back to cloth at night and peeing first thing.

When I saw these new Earth's Best diapers at Babies R Us for cheaper than Seventh Generation or even the Whole Foods brand, they are my new go-to disposables for night, travel and whenever I forgot to hang the diapers to dry in time to take one with us on an outing. And they are the first diapers in his memory that have any kind of design on them.

So now, added to our list of daily battles is the issue of the "night diaper." That's what he calls them, and that's what he wants. All. The. Time. Well, except when he wants underwear, or shorts without underwear. We've had some good experiments and some not-so-good experiments, enough to make it clear to me neither (none) of us is ready to fully take the plunge, so to speak.

I try not to make an issue out of the diaper thing; I put the Fuzzi Bunz on him when he's brushing his teeth or washing his hands or looking at a book, or, if he notices it's not one of the coveted "night diapers," I make a game of having him help me with the snaps. When all else fails, I try a raspberry on the belly and hope he won't grab a fistful of hair in protest of my denying him his special yellow logo. It's not like he ever ate any jarred baby food, so there's no product recognition. (I did offer it a few times after my own purees were rejected. He preferred celery. I'm not kidding.)

Still, I guess the design is something fun to look at, and I have to realize that the issue of brand recognition is not going to go away. But I'm still hoping to keep it simple as long as possible. Oh, except that I did buy him some dinosaur underwear (two of the three in the pack were plain!), and then we went to get more white at another store. This photo exposes me as having one Pooh plate, too. I guess I'm a little less subtle than I think.

Well, we can still just call it the "bear" and the ice cream truck the "music truck" and the Earth's Best the "night diapers." Let's hope I'm not just leading him on the quick route to generic prescription drugs.