What are you doing, 'col?

Well, I'm doing laundry, which hardly bears mentioning, since I'm always doing laundry. Unless I've given up on the laundry, in which case spook is doing it. This morning he said that he had put in all the laundry last night, and I thought no way, and then I discovered that all the laundry did not include the two sets of sheets and mattress pad that have been waiting to be washed, oh, since Jacob was born. I don't want to diminish his achievement; there was a lot of damn washing to do. He also washed all of the bottles and all of the breastpump paraphernalia, no minor feat. So today I'm trying to get through the aforementioned sheets, and to assemble all the diapers and put them away. For ten seconds we could have clean diapers.

Can we talk about cloth diapers for a second? They are not nearly the nightmare that I was afraid they would be. When I told Adam about it, he said "You're doing all that folding?" Incredulous, wide-eyed. I know there are people who do all that folding and think nothing of it, but I am not of that tribe. No, in fact, we bought the BumGenius diapers (I am embarrassed just typing that), a diaper described to us (more embarrassment coming up) as "the Cadillac of diapers." No lie. These are pretty awesome, and totally straightforward, a big plus for me since when the Diaper Lady was demonstrating prefolds for us, I realized that I would need a degree in engineering just to understand how the damn thing was supposed to go together. The other big factors in the ease of our cloth diaper experience are:

1) Flushable liners. You wouldn't think this would matter much at the infant poop stage, but they cut down on the rinsing.
2) A spray head for our laundry sink tap. Thank you, Jenny. Before this I could not get the water pressure high enough and had to scrape poop out of the diapers by hand. (Ew. I know. But babies are gross, so stay with me.)
3) Laundry in our apartment. I cannot stress this enough.

The other thing I've been doing lately is reading a lot about food. I just finished Michael Pollan's In Defense of Food. He says in the introduction that he wrote it after The Omnivore's Dilemma was published partly in response to the reader questions he received: now that you've done all this research about food production, what do you think we should eat? What do you eat? So it's two parts critique of the way nutrition science filters into the public imagination and one part his guidelines about what he thinks makes sensible eating. His ideas feel possible to adopt, unlike the dogmatic and rigid thinking which makes up so much of food discourse. Instead of feeling squashed by impossible standards, I came off the end of this book feeling inspired to change our food habits--both shopping and eating.