Starbucks iced coffee and my experience with ordering from China

First, let me say that I LOVE, LOVE, LOVE these individual iced coffee packets from Starbucks! If you buy them from Walmart, they come out to about $1.25 per glass + plus whatever you pay for any cream or sugar you add. It still adds up when you drink at least one every day, I know. My friend sent me a post recently about how to cold brew iced coffee, so one of these days when I get the time (yeah right!), I’m going to check it out and see how to do it. Next… normally I’d be concerned about ordering anything from China, but I’d read a lot of reviews about the Alva Baby cloth diapers company, and they were mostly positive. Their diapers are by far the cheapest I’ve come across ($5.99 for an AI2 and free shipping!), so I ordered one today to see if I like them. The site was a bit of a nightmare to order from. It was, possibly, user error. I’ll admit that. Oh, I want to add that I’m all for buying American, but let’s be honest…Americans are never going to sell a cloth diaper for $5.99, because we won’t work for 10 cents an hour! Military families do NOT have a lot of money, unless the service member is high-ranking. So I’ll order from China with no qualms, thank you very much.

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Cloth Diapering WILL work for me!

Despite the fact my husband is grossed out over washing poopy diapers in our washing machine, I’m insistent that I’m doing this. For one, it’s better for the environment (yes, I know you can argue that you still use gallons of water every year to wash them blah blah blah, but at least I’m not filling up a landfill), and two…extremely cost effective, especially if you use the same diapers on multiple kids, which we will. Our son’s two months old, and I haven’t started yet. I figured that as a new mom/new wife (my husband was deployed, so we’ve barely lived together), cloth diapering might be too much on top of it all. I pulled out the two diapers I’ve bought yesterday. One is a diaper cover with prefolds and the other is a pocket diaper with inserts. I bought two more pocket diapers on Zulilly today, which brings my grand total to four. That’s not so great, considering I need about 12 if I wash daily. It’s a start though. I plan to look for deals and buy them from different sources. Cloth diapering costs money up front but will save thousands in the long run.

I’m dying to try one of my cloth diapers on my son today, but I need to wash them first. I’m still looking into laundry detergents suitable for cloth diapers. So far, I’m looking at Rockin’ Green (but I’m not sure about the scents) or Tiny Bubbles. I already have Tide Free & Gentle, which some people use for cloth diapering, but seems to leave build up on diapers over time. It should be okay for a few days until I buy new detergent, so I’ll probably go ahead and wash them today with the new 3-6 months clothes I pulled out yesterday. My 2-month old is now in 3-6 month clothes. He’s growing so quickly! 🙁

Also on the agenda for today…fold baby clothes, take the baby for a walk, look presentable before my husband gets home, unpack at least one moving box, and cook something edible for dinner. I’m thinking rice with a can of cream of mushroom soup sauce (it’s cheating, I know) and some ground hamburger in there for protein. Salad on the side, of course. Pudding for dessert would be yummy. Hmmm…I should mention I need to lose 30 pounds of baby weight.

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