Once upon a time there was a young woman who was monetarily slender (ahembrokeahem) and pregnant, and she was also very Earth-concious and wanted to make the best choice when it came to diapering her soon-to-be bundle of joy. She told her family members that she wanted to cloth diaper, and they all laughed at her and said "Yeah, we'll see how long THAT lasts!" Not to be discouraged, she waited until her new baby was four months old (because obviously newborn poop is horribly messy and no cloth diaper could possibly contain it all and anyway who wants to touch poop?!) and found some amazingly adorable diapers that she knew she had to have (they were called FuzziBunz for those of you who haven't heard of them). So she approached her husband - laptop in hand - and presented him with the beautiful, rainbow images of soft, fluffy reuseable diapers, excitedly awaiting him to say "Heck yes! Let's order some!" And they'll live happily ever after. Only that didn't actually happen, because when her husband saw the price per diaper he almost needed a diaper himself and immediately exclaimed "We can't afford that!" She was very smart however, and had anticipated this reaction so she presented him with a chart which showed approximately how much money one would spend on disposable diapers over the course of a child's diaper-wearing career. He still seemed hesitant and said, "We have enough going on here. I don't want to have to worry about extra loads of laundry and scraping poop into the toilet and all that other stuff." Over the course of the next few days she drilled the cost savings into the poor man's head, and vowed that she would handle all cloth diaper laundry and scraping-of-poop. Finally, he agreed - somewhat reluctantly - and she placed the order with a giddy smile and a bit of a psychotic happy dance. Today, the woman and her husband have two children, a plethora of cloth diapers, and Mr. Hubbykins is a total cloth diaper advocate, telling anyone who will listen about the amazing benefits of cloth diapers. Oh yes, and they are living happily ever after today. Now, I am imagining here that my husband was not the only father or father-to-be that reacted this way towards the idea of cloth diapering. I am also imagining, however, that there were just as many fathers or fathers-to-be that were all for cloth diapering, possibly even suggesting the idea in the first place. One thing that I have noticed, however, is that dads who cloth diaper do things a bit differently than the mom counterparts do. Since I don't know most of your husbands, much less how they handle cloth diapering, I will use my husband as an example. I have a very specific way of putting cloth diapers on our daughter, and also a very specific way of adjusting them once they're on to make sure everything is tucked in and smoothed out. My husband has very specific ways of doing these things as well, but for some reason whenever he puts a diaper on, it looks completely different than it does when I do it! I cannot figure it out for the life of me! I have watched him put diapers on, and it appears as though he goes through the same motions that I do, and yet the end result is never the same and I always find myself sneakily (or sometimes blatantly) re-adjusting the diaper because it bothers me. Folding the diapers is another task in which the end results are much different between my husband and I. My husband will take all of the outer shells and fold them in half and stack them, and will then stack up all of the inserts and plop each stack in the drawer. I, on the other hand, will sit there for an hour stuffing each pocket diaper, snapping each insert into my AI2s and fitteds, and then snapping each diaper up in the front so it looks pretty and fluffy. Only to have to unsnap every single one as I need them, so that I can put it on my kid and then snap it up yet again. Hmm..... okay, so my husband's method is looking more and more appealing. Washing the diapers is pretty much the same, except for one thing: remember how I mentioned the beautiful young woman (oh, I didn't say beautiful before? Well she is!) vowed to handle all cloth diaper laundry and scraping-of-poop? Well the woman's husband held her to that through the course of the first child, and she happily did it because she won the cloth diaper coin toss. With the second child, however, the woman knew that her husband was completely for cloth diapering, and so she began to get him to do cloth diaper laundry here and there just to make things new and exciting. The problem with this is that because she was now a pro at dirty diaper laundry and he was not, he would often stand in front of the washing machine, staring blankly at the settings until he at last asked her what to do. Now, he too is a dirty diaper pro's apprentice and can succesfully wash the cloth diapers himself! Hurrah! Of course, I realize that there are many dads who are better at cloth diapering than others, and some who are solely responsible for the care and handling of said cloth diapers. I want to know: does the man in your life share in the CDing responsibilities? How does it differ from the way that you do it? How is it the same or better? - Our Resident Mom, Lindsay Lewis