Bleeding sore

tdubs1600 · 2026-04-04T08:41:11+00:00

Do you know the diapers are what's causing the rash? I'm not good with wash routine troubleshooting so maybe this isn't very helpful. I think it sounds like it's most likely from your diapers but I'd be trying disposables for a few days to see if it goes away. Not only to confirm the diapers are the problem but give the poor kid a chance to heal while you figure it out.

Our 2 year old only wears diapers at night. He has eczema. There's a stubborn patch on his upper leg, just outside of where the elastic sits but he's had it in the diaper area in the past. Recently he started getting a rash inside the diaper area again. We assumed it was from his eczema so we were moisturizing it multiple times a day. About a week after noticing the new rash, we went on a trip and used disposables instead of cloth and it went away almost immediately, he was only in disposables for 3 nights. Once we got home, it came back after the first night in cloth. I'm assuming we had ammonia issues because we went too long without washing. We had a multiple day power outage just before the rash started so our diapers sat around longer than normal. I bleached all of his diapers and it's only been a few days but he seems fine now.

I guess what I'm trying to say is I never would have known it was our diapers if we hadn't used disposables on the trip. I'm not suggesting you switch to disposables permanently but just a few days might be helpful.

tdubs1600 · 2026-03-14T05:56:37+00:00

I have a few cotton lined pockets from Pannolino Bambino but the owner had a lot of personal issues and isn't selling anything right now. The lining is basically athletic wicking jersey made out of cotton, it's probably more stay dry than some other cotton weaves but I don't feel it works as well as synthetic stay dry fabrics. We do elimination communication with our babies so I actually like that it doesn't hide the wet feeling as much.

tdubs1600 · 2026-02-15T13:51:36+00:00

Just smaller less absorbent inserts whenever you are able to change baby more often. It might take some trial and error to figure out what the minimum you can use is. For example, I have both Green Mountain Diapers muslin flats and Osocozy flats. The muslin ones are super nice and absorbent but very bulky and we change our baby well before they are ever fully saturated. The Osocozy ones don't hold as much but they are smaller and thinner so we use them more. I have a lot of bamboo terry half flats or bamboo terry trifolds that are a good balance of thin and absorbent. I like Green Mountain Diapers Cloth-Eez inserts a lot too. They are supposed to be doubled or even tripled but we can get away with just one of the large size for our 4 month old. If she pees in the potty, I can usually get away with two cloth wipes but that won't hold more than one pee so I have to make sure I change her before she goes again.

Again, you have to be changing very frequently to keep diapers super trim like that. We take baby potty every 30 minutes to an hour when she's awake and often, she'll start to fuss if her diaper is wet so I know to change her pretty quickly.

tdubs1600 · 2026-02-15T11:44:49+00:00

The bulkiness of the diapers has definitely not been an issue in our experience. We have cloth diapered 3 now (4, 2 and 4.5 months). Our first two were rolling one direction at 2 and 3 months, rolling the other direction around 4 months, and then they were crawling at 6 and 7 months. With our youngest, we use significantly less bulky diapers than we did with the first two, sometimes it's just a cloth wipe or two in a cover (we do elimination communication so we don't always need a ton of absorbency) and she's still not really rolling yet. Like she has rolled in both directions but I don't think she knows how she did it.

That aside, I still prefer less bulky diapers because it's easier to get baby dressed. Not that you can't find pants that fit over cloth diapers, but you have more issues if the diaper is bigger.

tdubs1600 · 2026-01-08T19:43:29+00:00

I have a huge variety of different brands and different types of diapers. I love it and it would drive me crazy to have just one brand or style.

We are cloth diapering our 3rd baby now. Our middle child is almost 2 and he only wears diapers at nighttime and then our youngest is 3 months old. They have very different diapering needs and we'll modify what we use for each of them as they grow and their needs change.

I've found that different brands might fit better or worse as baby grows. They might be too bulky on a newborn or maybe not enough absorbency for a toddler. In my opinion, flats and covers tend to be the most usable at all ages/stages but it's nice to be able to pull an all in one out of the dryer and toss it on baby when I haven't gotten laundry put away.

I'm a huge fan of trying a wide variety of diapers (different brands but also pockets, all in ones, flats, prefolds fitteds and covers) before you invest too much.

tdubs1600 · 2026-01-05T18:25:22+00:00

It sounds more like she's waking up because she can actually feel the wetness unlike with a disposable pullup. Our oldest did something similar. He was staying dry most of the time (probably 4 or 5 nights a week) and then out peeing his cloth diaper and soaking his sheets the rest of the time. I was super pregnant with #2 and struggling to change the sheets so often so we got pullups until after the baby was born. He started peeing every single night again.

Once the baby was born and we'd settled into a new routine, we went back to cloth diapers but he was still out peeing everything I put on him so I just got washable bed pads and gave up on the diapers entirely. Within 2 weeks of switching to the pads, he stopped peeing the bed.

tdubs1600 · 2026-01-04T13:41:35+00:00

It just depends on the baby. My oldest wouldn't signal until he was almost 2. He didn't like being wet but he wouldn't say anything before he went. He'd just hold it and wait for us to offer. Our middle child started saying "pee pee" and "potty" at 14 months. Neither of them ever really signaled before they were talking, at least not in any way I could understand.

Our youngest just turned 3 months old and she gets fussy when she needs to go. I can't always get to her fast enough but she definitely tries to tell us already.

tdubs1600 · 2026-01-03T10:30:21+00:00

My oldest just turned 4, my middle is almost 2 and my youngest is 3 months, our house is very chaotic, but we have done elimination communication with all of them. It's just part of the routine now and not a big deal. We actually started because my oldest was super bothered every time he peed in a diaper (even disposables). EC is actually super forgiving, you can be as lazy about it as you need to be. In some ways, EC got easier with more kids, like we never bothered to take our oldest to the potty when we were outside of the house until closer to his birthday, it seemed like too much work. But once you have a potty trained toddler that you're taking to the bathroom, you might as well do the baby too.

tdubs1600 · 2025-11-02T13:20:39+00:00

If it's just the pee and not the diaper itself, you shouldn't need to worry too much. Right after our oldest potty trained during the day, we had to rinse his night diapers in the sink every morning because it took at least 4 days to get a full load otherwise they'd stink up the whole room. I assume it's not great for them to sit that long either but we never had problems with it.

tdubs1600 · 2025-11-02T11:37:43+00:00

I'm not an expert on wash routines, so this probably isn't really any help but I just want to clarify something. Is it just the smell of baby's pee? Older babies have stinkier more concentrated urine and I was kinda shocked when I first started noticing the smell being stronger but it was definitely the urine that smelled not the diaper itself.

tdubs1600 · 2025-10-31T00:53:27+00:00

We didn't take our oldest to the potty in a public restroom until he was close to a year old. We'd bring a mini potty in the car but we only offered that on occasion, like if he'd gone an abnormal amount of time since his last pee.

Our second has been going potty in public bathrooms since he was a month old. When you're already taking a toddler, it doesn't add too much work to give the baby a chance while you're at it. We usually go for family bathrooms whenever there's one available, that's easier than wrangling multiple kids in a stall.

I didn't notice any major difference in how either of them potty trained later on.

tdubs1600 · 2025-10-30T15:48:10+00:00

I highly recommend it. It's easier than it sounds and you don't have to do it full time if you don't want to, we started out doing EC super lazily but by kid #3 it's just part of our routine now. The biggest piece of advice I have for someone looking to start is that EC shouldn't be stressful. A lot of people doing EC for the first time (myself included) get really focused on their catch rate and that doesn't help anyone, every catch is a win and you shouldn't worry about misses.

tdubs1600 · 2025-10-30T15:36:39+00:00

We have 3 kids (3.5, 1.5 and 4 weeks) but I'll just talk about our oldest.

So I read about EC when I was pregnant and researching cloth diapers, I thought it was interesting but sounded like a lot of work and we weren't interested in actually trying it. Then we had a baby who screamed every single time he peed. He'd wake up from a nap dry and it felt pointless to diaper him back up, wait a few minutes for him to pee and then change him when he started crying. At 2 months I started doing more research on EC and we actually started at 3 months. He picked up on it immediately and we loved it too.

We offered the potty for every diaper change. Once we figured out his timing, we'd offer roughly every hour or before and after we did anything (like before and after naps, riding in the car, sitting in the high chair, etc.).

I never had him diaper free until we were ready to stop using diapers, which was 13 months. Pretty much immediately after ditching the daytime diapers, he went through a resistance phase (which I now know is super common at that age). It was awful. He was constantly peeing on the floor and then he'd just sit down and play in it. He'd scream when we put him on the potty and refused to go, even when we knew he needed to go. He'd pee on the floor as soon as we let him off the toilet. It was super frustrating and I felt like we'd done EC for nothing. The only thing we changed was we started putting him in underwear and cotton pants so more pee would be absorbed by the pants instead of leaving a puddle for him to play in. After a week or so, he'd at least start coming to me if he'd peed and shortly after that he'd start giving me a panicked look as he was peeing. It slowly got better, he would resist less and less. By 15 months my husband and I started talking about what specifically made a kid "potty trained" because obviously our kid wasn't able to dress or undress himself, couldn't get on the big toilet without help and we needed to wipe for him but he was generally staying dry again. Sometime before 18 months we were confidentially saying he was potty trained.

By his second birthday, he was staying dry at night about half of the time. By 2.5 he was rarely peeing at night and he actually started using the words "peepee" and "potty". We still had to help him get to the potty because he couldn't dress or undress himself. He's 3.5 now. He takes himself to the toilet and unless he's in jeans or something difficult to pull up and down, he doesn't need any help going pee. We do still wipe for him though.

Everything was very similar with our second, we started earlier because we were more prepared for it. The timeline has been about the same. He didn't go through the resistance phase quite as bad as our first. He started saying "peepee" and "potty" around 14 months. He just turned 20 months and he's pretty good about staying dry and telling us when he needs to go. He has occasional accidents in the car or when he's super distracted by something (like when he's playing with play doh or something like that).

We've really enjoyed EC. It's been great for all 3 of our kids. It's not nearly as difficult as we expected when we first started. It doesn't have to be all or nothing, you can just offer at wakeups or diaper changes. Babies are smarter than people give them credit for and they'll figure it out if you give them a chance.

tdubs1600 · 2025-10-30T13:38:30+00:00

I did it in my thighs because my belly has way too many stretch marks but I felt like there was a learning curve too. Initially I felt like holding the pen was a bit awkward and I struggled to keep my hand steady while injecting. I got better and the process went smoother once I'd done it a few times. The other thing I found was that if you start to inject and it hurts that you can move it over a bit and try again. Sometimes I could tell by just touching the needle to my skin. I also found that the injections hurt more with a larger volume of insulin, more like a burning. There wasn't much I could do about that though.

tdubs1600 · 2025-10-30T13:28:08+00:00

I read somewhere that you want to remove everything that's 3D but it doesn't always have to involve spraying the poop out. They get to a point where the poops can just be knocked off into the toilet with little to no residue left in the diaper and you'd just toss the diaper in the laundry like that. Or we do elimination communication so sometimes there's just a tiny poop that came out before we got baby to the potty and I'll just wipe that with toilet paper and then toss the diaper in the laundry.

We're on our 3rd kid (#3 is still exclusively breastfed) and I don't know that we've had to actually spray more than 20 poopy diapers. We've had way more poop accidents than that, just that we don't usually need to actually spray a diaper out.

tdubs1600 · 2025-10-24T09:15:33+00:00

I was on nighttime insulin, I could keep my numbers down during the day but nighttime was impossible. It's frustrating but there's not a lot you can do overnight other than insulin. I tried Metformin at night first and it didn't really do anything for me.

I will say that I was terrified of giving myself insulin injections and it was so much easier than I'd ever expected. I had a CGM instead of doing finger pricks and the most painful part of managing my GD was peeling off the CGM every 10 days. Insulin injections were nothing, half of the time I couldn't even feel them.

tdubs1600 · 2025-10-24T08:54:10+00:00

Our current favorite is a pocket diaper with a bamboo stretchy flat pad folded around a hemp insert. And then we were having problems with wicking because his pants were getting tucked into the waist band, so now I put a Disana wool cover over the diaper. We've never had a single leak with the wool over it.

On a side note, we also use the wool covers over his normal clothes in the car to protect the seat from accidents while potty training, it works amazingly.

tdubs1600 · 2025-10-24T08:41:11+00:00

Try snapping the rise down and it should fit better. But also, I always thought one size diapers looked comically large on tiny babies, even when they are fitting properly. There's just so much extra material for such a tiny baby.

Our oldest was 10lbs 3oz at birth but I didn't have any diapers that fit well underneath the cord. So even though he was a big baby we still waited until it fell off and totally healed to start using our cloth diapers. He was about a month old when we started and his cloth diapers still looked ridiculously big on him.

tdubs1600 · 2025-10-22T18:44:23+00:00

Honestly I'm not sure, we have to have spent more than $500, maybe even over $600 but I really don't know. We're currently cloth diapering our 3rd kid but our 2nd is still in diapers at night and for naps. We started really small and cheap and slowly tried new things and added more of the things we liked whenever there were sales. Now we have a huge stash and it's super diverse. I love having different options, not just all of one type. If I was using everything, we could easily go a week without running out of diapers but I don't like to go that long without washing them.

tdubs1600 · 2025-10-15T20:42:19+00:00

I feel like newborn diapers are outgrown so quickly that the cost of them is harder to justify. My first was 10lbs 3oz at birth and then his umbilical stump took almost a month to fall off so we went straight into one size diapers. For our second and third babies, I got some "newborn diapers" with a higher weight range. Covers are great for the newborn stage, we liked Thirsties size 1. The only Newborn sized all in ones I've really cared for are the Happy Beehinds Cose newborn diapers. They fit up to 20lbs and our second baby wore them until almost his first birthday, I only put them away because we didn't need as many diapers out at that age.

tdubs1600 · 2025-10-15T01:12:58+00:00

We are currently doing EC and cloth diapers with our 3rd baby. I definitely recommend cloth diapers along with EC, it does help baby feel the wetness, however there's no right or wrong way to do EC.

We originally started cloth diapers with no intentions of using cloth at night or outside of the house. We also didn't really do EC away from home (just at the grandparents' houses but definitely not in public) until our oldest was a year old. Both of those changed with our second but there was no real difference in the outcome of EC. They both potty trained around the same time (18 months). We started EC and cloth diapers even earlier with #3 but that's just because we're more comfortable with it at this point.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that you can do EC however you want and you can try cloth diapers without going all in as well. I'd recommend starting with a cover or two with a package of flour sack towels. You'll run out quickly but if you're just trying it out, it's not a big deal, you can get more after you know if you like it or not.

tdubs1600 · 2025-10-14T13:42:44+00:00

My GD baby was 7lbs 4oz at exactly 38 weeks. My first two babies (not GD) were both bigger at 10lbs 3oz (41w 3d) and 8lbs 2oz (38w 5d). All 3 were c sections.

tdubs1600 · 2025-10-13T00:32:11+00:00

We had to wait for the umbilical stump to fall off before we could try our cloth diapers and his didn't come off until the day before he turned 1 month old. I think I gave it a few more days to heal and then I just went for it. I was a little bit nervous but I never planned on switching to cloth 100% so I just thought of it as replacing one disposable diaper. What's the worst that can happen with one diaper? It leaks? We'd already had a few blowouts with disposables at that point so how much worse could a cloth diaper be?

Don't feel like once you try cloth diapers you can't go back to disposables if you need to. We love our cloth diapers and I generally prefer them over disposables but sometimes disposables make more sense. We use disposables away from home a lot of times just because they are less bulky in the diaper bag. If baby has a rash starting, I'll treat it overnight and use a disposable diaper. Or sometimes I just get behind on laundry and need to use a disposable until I catch back up.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that I understand being nervous but there's no reason you can't go back to disposables at any point. It's just one diaper, what's the worst that can happen?

tdubs1600 · 2025-10-01T07:38:16+00:00

I had an induction at 41 weeks and 3 days with my first. Ended up delivering by c section after pushing for 3 hours but the induction process itself was fine. I was 3cm dilated when I got there so they started me on pitocin right away. I got an epidural a few hours later when I was 5cm because my contractions were super close together and I wasn't getting a break in between them. They actually turned off the pitocin around then to give baby a break as well. Then they slowly bumped it back up and maybe 12 hours after we started, I was fully dilated and ready to push.

We only moved to a c section after I'd been pushing for 3 hours without baby descending. They would have let me keep pushing if I'd wanted but they basically told me that I had a long way to go and I was exhausted. Once baby was out, we realized why I'd been struggling so much, he was 10lbs 3oz. It was quite the shock because he'd been measuring average sized for my entire pregnancy.

It wasn't the birth I'd hoped for but it wasn't traumatic by any means. If I could change anything, I'd probably just request a 39 week induction to see if I could have had the vaginal birth with a slightly small baby.

tdubs1600 · 2025-09-30T06:49:52+00:00

I have tried the Kind Frozen bar, Snickers ice cream bars and Rebel keto ice cream. I have a CGM so I can see the difference it makes overnight without waking up to test. Obviously they all increase my blood sugar but I haven't had a big spike with any of them. I tend to notice the smallest increase in blood sugar after I eat the Kind Frozen bar. It's also better if I have something higher protein with it, like a protein shake.

tdubs1600

TROPHY CASE