Week 41, and a new arrival!

Let me begin by leading you to this link: www.haveyouhadthatbabyyet.com. That's not the arrival I'm talking about.

Here I am at 41 weeks! 

Remember this picture? I have really enjoyed journeying with them through our pregnancies. The other two gals have already had their beautiful babies. Andrea's precious daughter Hannah was born last week. I don't get to see Andrea much, but Allison and I have been able to get together pretty often. We also call/text each other a lot. It has really helped me to have another person who is going through the exact same thing at the same time! Her beautiful daughter, Lylah, was born yesterday, so now we're just waiting on little Garrett. 

Ever since my last post, I have gotten so much encouragement. Thank you all so much for your calls, texts, comments, facebook posts, etc. I feel so much more at ease now that there's somewhat of a plan and now that I'm not just waiting indefinitely. 

I'm excited about Mom, Dad, and Jenny (and maybe Mike?) coming up this weekend to keep me distracted. Or to just be there when it happens! Since my family is kind of far (not just a drive across town), I have been worried that they won't make it in time. I'm not worried about that anymore. 

So, for the fun distracting stuff... My cloth diapers came yesterday!! I am so excited about these, especially because it will save us so much money in the long run. I have many friends at church that do cloth, so I have seen and am comfortable with how it all works. 

I decided to go with GroVia. My starter package is 12 shells and 24 soakers. Here are the shells. We will probably get a few more of these. GroVia is rolling out some kind of new product tomorrow, and we have quite a bit of store credit because of a great deal we got on these, so maybe I'll have some more solid colors. We think all of these colors are gender-neutral for any future bambinos.

Here are the "soakers." I have 24 of these, which gives me 24 diaper changes. These snap into the shells. If the shell doesn't get dirty, then just unsnap the soaker and snap a new one in. My friends say they can get about 3-4 soaker changes with one shell. Sometimes less...

The great thing about the GroVia shells (and other one-size cloth diapers) is that the diaper grows with the child from 8 lbs to potty training. (Since Garrett is already 8 lbs 10 oz, technically, we could probably start him on these right away! However, we will probably use disposable for a few weeks while we figure out some sort of a routine with him. We have received a lot of disposable diapers from showers and such anyway...)

Here are all the snaps:

Here is the shell only, snapped to the smallest size.

Here is the shell and the soaker side-by-side:

Here is the soaker snapped into the shell at the shell's smallest sizing. As you can see, the soaker is a bit big, but it allows for me to double up where needed - in the front for boys, in the middle for girls.

Here it is all put together - shell + soaker. 

I'm sure you'll see plenty of pictures of Garrett in these so you can see how they look on him. His little tushy will be rather large, so I'm thinking of re-doing the words to the rap, "I Like Big Butts," to be all about cloth diapering. Stay tuned!