A grain of salt

When I was pregnant with my daughter and planning for her arrival, my plan was to do cloth diapers. Back when I was a babysitting teen I used them; I knew they were easy.

But when I waded into the modern world of cloth diapers—YIKES. It was a whole LIFESTYLE. People were collecting cloth diapers and trading them in different prints, like effing Beanie Babies. Neverending discussions about troubleshooting, absorption, designs, elaborate washing protocols, which ones leak less, pros and cons, SO MANY BRANDS.

Sweet jesus, all I wanted was a damned cotton rectangle to catch my kid's piss. If I didn't already have experience with cloth diapers, I would have been scared right off.

Here's the real deal: most cloth diapers—standard cloth rectangles that you get from a diaper service—people don't talk about, because there isn't much to say. They just work. It's not a hobby, it's not a lifestyle, it's cheap and effective and there isn't any reason to blather on and on about it, so if you're looking for info on how to do cloth diapers, you might miss it. But people use them all the time; most of the fellow baby-havers I met here in town used the same diaper service I did.

I try to remember that in other settings: if something seems like A BIT MUCH, it might be because for every one person who is turning it into A Whole Thing, there are a hundred people who are just living their regular life and it's not that big a deal.

There are plenty of people homeschooling—completely successfully!—in a much more laid-back way than I am.

Our daughter is an outlier; even by the standards of experts who work with complicated kids, she's an outlier. So for us, yes, it's A Whole Thing, but no no no no no, that doesn't mean it would be for you, too. For lots of families, it's a cakewalk. (And actually it's a laid-back cakewalk for us too, especially compared to making a traditional school work.)