Tuesday, September 14, 2010

The remodel

So I found out today that the camp is buying a new dishwasher, stove, and microwave hood vent for our house!!!!!  This is so exciting, I've lived in a house with a dishwasher for about 1 second of my life so the fact that soon I will have a brand new one is enough but then I also get to experience a new oven and a microwave hood (which I've never used before either!) and I'm over the moon!!!!!

So if you can't tell we are having our kitchen remodeled, we moved into this house at the beginning of summer knowing that at the end of summer we were going to remodel the kitchen.  Before this house was a staff house it was the VIP cottage/nurses station so there wasn't really a need for a full kitchen.  When we moved in it only had a fridge, and a sink,  and a very small counter top with enough cupboard space to frustrate a leprechaun, and we brought our microwave.  Like I said we moved in knowing that we were going to get a new kitchen at the end of summer and it wasn't a big deal because it was summer and living at a youth camp with my husband as the food service manager we were always welcome at the dinning hall to eat and there were meals all summer long so no big deal.
Here are some pics of the house as a work in progress.

 
Right where Bobby is standing is where there use to be a wall, and on the left is our tiny tiny kitchen, jam packed, that's even with all of our dishes, pots, pans, tupperware, cooking utensils, and most of out canned goods packed away!

That is all of the counter space, and our sink, they have torn out some walls at this point, and our cabinets.


These are our new cabinets pretty close to where they are actually going to go.





Behind where the sink is where the new cabinets are is where the washer and dryer use to be.



This is how I kept Rylee out from underfoot, this is looking from the kitchen into the living room.



The new diswasher!



The new stove and microwave!




Getting close!  Just waiting on counter tops and flooring, and staining the cabinets and paint!

Monday, September 6, 2010

G-diapers our first cloth diaper!



The first cloth diaper that we bought were g-diapers, they are a hybrid cloth diaper, meaning that you can put a g-cloth insert or a g-refill insert in the diaper.  The g-refills are biodegradable, compostable (only pee ones) and flushable, and at only a couple cents more per insert are a not bad green option if you don't want to dive all the way into cloth!  We have some g-refills but use the g-cloth inserts 90% of the time.


Rylee was "helping" me!  On the left is the g-refill, then the cloth, then the snap in nylon liner and finally the cloth g-pant.
 
This is what it looks like with the nylon liner snapped in the g-pant

This is what it looks like with the g-cloth in the liner, this is ready to go, just grab baby and put it on!

This is what it looks like with the flushable insert in the liner, again this is ready to go!  I usually have all of my diapers ready to go so I can just grab and go.  The g-cloth are made of 4 layers,  two layers are 100% polyester microfleece and two layers of hemp/cotton.  The snap in liner is nylon which is breathable, and the g-pants are a breathable cotton.  You can reuse the g-pant and the nylon snap in liner as long as they don't get poop on them, you can just take the dirty insert out and replace it with a clean one,  so in theory you can use the same cover all day long!

As Rylee has gotten older she now has solid poop and it hardly ever gets on the liner and it never gets on the g-pant.  A younger baby with runnier poop you would have to change the liner after every poop.  I have found that the g-cloth is only good for a couple hours at the most, they are probably hold the least amount of liquid of all of my diapers but they are the most trim so you do compromise absorbency for fit but that is true of all diapers.  

The g-pants fasten using velcro and they fasten in the back (to make it harder for little hands to undo the diaper between diaper changes)  They also have laundry tabs which is what keeps the velcro from attaching to other things in the dryer. 

The snap in liners have a shelf life of about 6 months and after 6 months they lose their water proofness so you do have to replace them after 6 months

These diapers are sized, Rylee is in the medium which fit 13 pounds-28 pounds she has been in this size since we started and she is currently 22 pounds so she has quite a while left in them.  We get a great fit with this diaper and always have.

I really like these diapers I like that Rylee can wear most of her smaller sized clothes (the ones she can't wear with any of her other diapers)with these diapers, I don't like that I have to changer her more often when she wears these diapers.
The g-refills are more absorbant and more trim than any cloth diaper out there, but they are also more expensive in the long run.  I like to use the g-refills when Rylee has a diaper rash that requires using diaper cream, you shouldn't put diaper cream on cloth diapers because it causes the cloth to not absorb and smell and the diaper cream stains also.