Diaper Dilemma

Here is my ponderance for the day...what the hell did people do before disposable diapers?  I know, I know, they used cloth.  But my question is HOW!?  There must have been one hell of a lot of laundry gettin done. 

I am brought to this ponderance by this morning's wake up call.  I hear "Mommmm, Mommmmm!" over the monitor and assume that the boy is up for the day.  It's 6:00...half hour longer than usual but it makes sense.  So I run up the stairs to retrieve the boy and in the dark of the snowy morning the little man bleats, "Woook!  Messss!" and points to some smatherings in his crib.  I've been a tad under the weather for the past 48 so I just assume that he has picked up what I have and has either A. An abundance of snot or B. Puked a little.  Upon turning on the light I found he had neither...it was a diaper explosion!

Somewhere along the lines of me feeling icky last night Hubba Hubba was kind enough to offer to put the Monster mimi's.  I failed to communicate to him that he needed to change him out of his standard diaper into his high performance, ultra absorbent, space derived sleepin pants.  That being said, the midget was ill-equipped for the night.  He consumes more liquid than a camel in the course of a day and no ordinary pants will do.  He'll shoot those right out of the water and that is precisely what he did.  He peed so much that this diaper didn't stand a chance.  It literally exploded.  And for those of you who haven't had the pleasure of experiencing an exploded disposable, the manufacturer of these diapers has found that inserting minuscule gel beads into the pants is the best assurance for absorption.  So when said pants hit their maximum capacity load this is what you get...gel beads ALL over the place.  It's actually pretty gross considering they are sticky and urine soaked and attach themselves to everything in the near vicinity.  Not only is there gel everywhere but the poor guy was laying down for so long that the pee had a chance to work its way both up and down the totem pole entirely drenching his jams clear up to his COLLAR!  Never in my life have I seen a kid more enveloped in his own excess.  How on earth he slept 11 hours in that state of affairs I will never know.  This is nothing short of a miracle.

So now I am faced with the question of "What did the cloth diaper families of yore do with their camels?"  Wrap an afghan around their asses each night and hope for the best?  How on earth did they survive having to do a wash every morning cuz the kid saturated yet another outfit, another bed sheet and another blanket?  Perhaps this is when daily bathing became vogue.  I can see why.  I surely couldn't stand to smell of a pee soaked kid all day long.  It's one of those days that I stand in appreciation all the more of my mom and the hurdles she had when we were babies and thank my heavenly stars for the kind folks at Huggie's for finding an easier, more sanitary way!  Bravo!!!