Diaper Genie

As I mentioned previously, we did not cloth diaper with Pickle (other than a short-lived attempt at gDiapers).  I’d like to investigate it further with future children, but we did disposables the last time.

Hence…  we had to have somewhere to put those little chipmunk-sized stinkbombs that kept reproducing every few hours.  I’d had a lot of friends recommend the Diaper Genie (LINK), and I understood the principle behind it, so we went with it.

So, the theory behind a Diaper Genie is that it’s this thin thing, inside which there are liners.  You push a diaper down the top of it into the base, and the combination of the puckered top and the lid are supposed to contain the stink.  You keep pushing diapers into this long worm-shaped plastic bags until it’s either too full to shove anymore into it OR your partner refuses to change it, but is instead just setting dirty diapers on top of the Diaper Genie.  (In our house, we took turns playing that passive-aggressive game to get out of changing the bag.)  You remove the top, pull out the long snakey-looking plastic bag of dirty diapers, pull out the next one and get it all set up to receive your child’s next batch of poop- or pee-soiled undergarments, and then you figure out a way to get a four-foot-long bag of diapers into your regular trash bag.

As you could maybe guess from the above description, this system has some flaws.  First of all, let’s think about a bratwurst (I’m from the Midwest, that’s a thing here – if you don’t know what one is, think of a hot dog).  When a bratwurst is cooked too long and it expands too much, the sides burst.  Sort of the same principle with an overstuffed Diaper Genie bag – the sides can blow out.  This can even happen if it’s not overstuffed.  Then you just have a bedroom/laundry room/whatever with dirty, smelly diapers all over the floor.  This inevitably happens at 3 a.m., when you are least prepared to clean up 50 dirty diapers that have just rolled under the bed.  And of course some of them had blowouts on them, because you’re dealing with little babies.  So now that’s on your carpet or hardwood. 

Also, Diaper Genie knows what’s up.  They’re the most recognized diaper pail system out there, so they know that they can charge about $14 for a two-pack of pail liner things.  And there’s a fair number of bags in each one… but there are also a fair number of diapers used each day, so you’re going through them more rapidly than you would guess.  It’s a pretty sweet deal for Diaper Genie – I mean, how much can production costs actually be to snake together some tiny, skinny garbage bags and put them in a cardboard container?  But they’re smart enough to shape the insert so that you can’t really use anything else in there.

The good thing about the Diaper Genie is honestly that it does a good job at containing the smell from invading your room, and it’s an efficient way to contain that smell for a few days at a time while you wait for the bag to fill.  But, if we get pregnant again, I think we’ll likely look at another option as far as diaper disposal.  There are systems that can just use regular old trash bags – or else we also have room in our garage for just another regular old garbage pail that we could just use for dirty diapers.  I think either of those would be more efficient, time-saving systems.