Today's diapers might be the most absorbent material on earth. In fact I'm thinking of replacing my Sham-Wow (yes, I have one) with a diaper for absorbing spills.
When I changed Grace's diaper the other day the thing weighed something like 10 pounds. You could've used it as a weight for working out. Not a leak anywhere though - the diaper took it like a champ.
Audrey is still wearing pull-ups at night to prevent accidents and it's no wonder she wants them taken off the moment she hops out of bed - they weigh so much she must have trouble getting around. Needless to say the Dora the Explorer pictures on the front look a bit bloated since the night before.
We only have one diaper pail for diaper disposal but don't tend to use it because it ends up smelling so much after a couple days. The pail looks like it can hold the smell in and ostensibly is designed to do so but you'd need a hermetic seal to really do the trick. And the older the kids get, and the more diverse their food intake is, the more dangerous the smell of a pile of diapers is inside an enclosed plastic container.
What ends up happening in our household is we put used diapers, neatly wrapped up and secured with their sticky tabs, in small piles around the house throughout the day. And then we do a sweep of the house, gathering them up and depositing the whole lot into the garbage bin outside. (Decorum would prevent discussion of the smell of the outside garbage bin here.)
Once, thinking I'd save myself from having to scour the upstairs for used diapers at the end of the day, I decided to toss a fairly soaked one over the railing and onto the rug downstairs. I'd done it before with half-wet diapers (you'd never do it with poopy ones) and they landed softly, ready for me to pick up when I went downstairs. But a fully utilized diaper is another story and is not to be toyed with. It hit the floor with a tremendous thud and exploded into a thousand tiny pieces that looked like ice crystals, with each semi-transparent piece holding as much baby urine as it could. It was a mess and took forever to clean up; if you've ever swept up moist material with a broom you'll know what I mean.
Diapers are a blessing and a curse. You need them for keeping things tidy but don't like to change them. They are incredibly convenient but agonizingly expensive. They hurt the planet but can you really deal with cloth diapers mixed in with your clothes in the washing machine? We've tried the cloth ones but the truth is people really haven't solved the problem yet. Eluding everyone is a solution that is clean, easy and inexpensive.
Once I found a diaper with mold growing on it that had been deposited mistakenly in a box with other paraphernalia in our storage room - it was disgusting. Not as bad as finding a dead animal, but disgusting nonetheless. Baby diapers are tiny, often don't smell at first, and are easy to discard as normal trash. But over time they make their presence known.
If us adults had to wear diapers I don't think our world would be livable. It just wouldn't. Things would smell so bad we'd stay indoors. But then we wouldn't because the indoors would smell so bad. And the outdoors would be infiltrated with dirty diapers too. Not a good image.
In any case it's the technology advancement of diapers that prompted me to write this - you've got to fill a kid with incredible amounts of liquid for one to leak nowadays. Even the "green" diapers found at places like Whole Foods work pretty well.
Perhaps existing diaper technology ought to be applied to new things - towels, washcloths, gauze pads, kitchen towels, sponges, paper towels, etc. Or, on the other hand, should the diaper industry continue to work on poopy diapers, which remain a bit of a liability?
In either case, I love my girls, and I'm glad for diapers.
