I Wrote About a Book About Cloth Diapering

Hey, I wrote a book about cloth diapering. Last year, using my first foot surgery I thought “I should make a quick start guide to cloth diapering for everyone who lands in my message box needing help” and so I started on it. Sure, I have blogs, but blogs and websites are hard to format and sort through the chaos.  A book, or a magazine would be super convenient and tangible.  

At first it was a color magazine, but 20 pages turned to 40 pages. I abandoned it for some time, but this past fall began to work on it again turning 80 pages into 237 pages about me, cloth diapering basics, and full of pictures, diagrams, and more.

It’s been a wild ride. I have been cloth diaper blogging since 2015, and in 2018 launched the cloth diaper podcast. During this time, I have grown immensely in my thought leadership within the cloth diaper space. I have found myself teamed up against brands and communities – picking battles that squandered my energy and made me just toxic.

Since starting the podcast, I have listened with eagerness as parents around the world share their struggles, their problem solving, and their successes with cloth diapering. This taught me the cloth diapering is not about making someone do it your way – a common thought I used to have – but rather the encouragement and empowerment of families to choose cloth and do it their way. 

Cloth diapering around the world looks very different than in the United States. Its full of wash techniques and ideas that many of us would immediately say “NOOO” but I believe we need to stop saying no, and start listening.

Here’s the thing, when you start cloth diapering and you join a community – the leaders of that space, our knowledge is just passed down from one person to the next. In some communities this creates a telephone game, and information easily changes. When you go and look for sources and credible research it either varies drastically or doesn’t exist. 

It’s in this that I find the need to bring about a resurgence of peer-to-peer support that encourage us to speak from our experiences. 

With my book I wanted cloth diaper families to have enough of a base knowledge to have these conversations with others that allowed them to find what they needed. Because my own knowledge of brands and washing is limited to my experiences. My book is a guide to start with the basics, encourage you to think about what you really need, and break down many of the myths within the community that grow because of one perspective. 

I am really proud of my book. It has spelling mistakes, but it’s a years worth of writing and five years of personal growth. The book is written to talk about parents and families. It encourages you to find answers on your own, but it also breaks down all the basics in easy to read language. I read many books on writing this past year 😉

There will be parts of the book people disagree with. I think that’s just fine. It’s okay to disagree about things because that is founded in our experiences. The key is not to let these disagreements become something that we force onto people. Let them choose which journey to take on. That is part of parenting. 

My next goal is to publish the book as a book book. It’s expensive to print so I am trying to find some ways to shrink it down and consolidate some of the colour pictures. I hope to figure that out by fall. In the meanwhile you can buy it though amazon ebooks. Kindle is an application on most smart phones. 

Thank you for being here with me in this journey. Thank you to those who have been my cheerleaders, for those who have been with me in the lowest of lows, and those who continue to inspire me regular.