See this smile on my face?

So happy. (Yes, I know I scratched my forehead.)

I currently have many reasons to smile, but over the weekend I did not.

See, mom puts me in cloth diapers. It has become her new hobby, well, obsession, really. She does all the washing with special detergents, line drying in the sun, and fancy folds that these diapers require. However, sometimes things can go terribly wrong.

That is my face when I think about how bad things were this weekend.

When urine breaks down, it creates ammonia as a by-product.  When diapers don’t get quite clean enough, the ammonia builds up and can cause a burn on the skin. Yes. A burn. The nastiest sort of diaper rash.

I was hurting pretty badly, I was bright red, and I was very cranky.

So this happened.

While mom did this.

Boiling the diapers can get out all the build up. In cloth diapering terms, this is called “stripping” the diapers. Mom likes to think she is part of a long lineage of women who have boiled cloth diapers.

I have been slathered in ointments, and the redness is gone.

Mom still feels pretty terribly about the whole thing. She is glad I am better. Me too.