My wife and I had lofty ideas about how we would raise our babies. We knew they were lofty, but we went ahead and had those ideas anyway. We weren’t always on the same page. My plan to use cat-training techniques didn’t sit well with the wife, but it turns out spraying water in a baby’s face only makes them cry more anyway.

One of the lofty ideas to which we swore we would adhere was using biodegradable diapers. Have you seen these? You can flush them or compost them. The literature makes it seem as if your baby’s wee-wee can actually help save the planet. We lasted about a week before abandoning them in favor of good old, planet-killing disposables.

They caught pretty much all the shit and piss my babies could produce. The problem is each one has to be constructed. A biodegradable insert goes in a plastic hammock-type thing and those then go in the cloth outer diaper. When you change one, you have to prepare the next one so as not to be left with just one hand to assemble the contraption. That means, each time you change a diaper, you’re essentially changing two. And we have twins, so for us it was four diapers per change. When you’re practically psychotic from sleep deprivation and changing and constructing diapers at 3 a.m., you begin to actually hate the planet. Perhaps in your diminished mental state, you picture bringing a firm knee right up between the planet’s legs and then poking it in the eyes.

Add to this conundrum: the price (they’re expensive); that if some mess does escape the insert, that cloth diaper is taken out of rotation to be washed; and they didn’t actually flush well as evidenced by the overflowing toilet that graciously offered up one of our boy’s old turds.

I’m not saying this product or ones like them don’t work. Nor am I suggesting that your baby’s wee-wee won’t save the planet. I’m saying you have to be rich enough to afford a squad of well-paid help to use these diapers so, if you can, they are for you… unless, of course, you don’t have a baby. Then, they are not for you. Pervert.