The Diaper Decision & A Plea for Gender Neutrality

It happened spontanously. We were out shopping at Costco and were checking the costs of diapers when we both agreed to buy the box of generic disposables. They were $35 for 214 diapers which with any luck will carry us through the first month. The nice thing is that another friend with a 3 month old baby confirmed later that the Costco diapers were both good quality and well-priced.

So all those days and weeks of talking about what we are going to do is over. Disposable diapers won out in the end for many reasons, not the least of which is convenience and logistics. It’s much easier to throw out a used diaper than scrape, store, wash and dry a multitude of cloth diapers. Especially since we don’t have our own washer and dryer. The first of my “I’ll never…” statements has bought the dust.

We also bought some gender-specific clothes for pending baby. I’m both philosophically and viscerally against these bloody gender-specific clothes for babies. For crying out loud, these are BABIES we’re talking about. Does it matter if they’re a boy dressed in pink or a girl dressed in blue? Do we need cutsie-wootsie gender-specific outfits for them at such a young age? And after decades of the fight for equality, is it right that we’re pigeon-holing them into roles as soon as they’ve dropped from the womb?

I wish this madness would end and I could just dress the kid in whatever looks good. I fear being flooded with mounds of gender-specific clothing once Peach is born… I don’t think I can handle the onslaught of cuteness that’s about to hit.

At least I prevailed in once sense: I stopped Mom-to-Be from buying an outfit for Peach. It was sized for a 1 year old, and finally I got impatient and asked her if we really should be stocking up on items to store for a full year before we’ll use them. She agreed and relucantly put it back.