I didn't read the other responses so some of this might be repetetive, but here's my story: We use cloth diapers on DD who is now 3 months old. We use disposables for traveling but that is the only time we use them (a jumbo pack will last 4-6 weeks in this case). The only reason we don't travel with cloth is because they take up too much room in the diaper bag and are messier than I want to deal with. I bought all my diapers from organic bebe.com. (No, I don't work for them.) (I believe jardine diapers has a good website too - has lots of FAQ on cloth diapering. Type the name in a search engine. I've never ordered from them though.) After trial and error and several orders I've decided that 3 dozen diapers and about 5 wraps is a good amount to have on hand. This leaves you doing laundry every other day. We only use the prefolds because it's the cheapest and not any less convenient than all-in-ones or fitted diapers. Plus, I don't have a lot of space to store several different kinds of diapers. With the prefolds, I just stack them up and put them on a shelf. Works very easily. We have a wet pail and a dry pail. Basically a wet pail is a bucket of water that we keep in the bathroom that has a presoak in it (we use BIZ - look in the laundry aisle). Poopy diapers go in here. We also have a dry soak that lives by the crib. It is a diaper pail with a trash bag in it. Wet diapers go in here. We were just using a wet pail but it was filling up too fast and I wasn't sure wet diapers needed to really "soak" anyhow. Since DD only has a poopy diaper about once a day it's very convenient to have the dry pail so close to the crib! The wet pail lives in the bathroom so that you can dump the solids in the toilet before allowing the diapers to soak. When it's time to do a wash I dump all the diapers in the washer and run it on hot. We use dreft detergent on the cloth diapers but any detergent will do. (Somebody gave it to us and I thought we should make sure baby's bum isn't sensitive to Tide or other detergents. Plus, somebody said Dreft gets the diapers the whitest-don't know if that's true or not. When we run out of Dreft we'll probably use the family detergent. I use Tide on all her clothes as well as ours.) I do not dry the wraps in the dryer. I let them air dry. But, I do use the dryer for the prefolds. When buying prefolds you want to make sure they are good quality. Chinese prefolds and Baby textiles are supposedly the best but I go by their absorbancy chart. 4x8x4 is what I buy. That means there are 8 layers of absorbancy in the middle and 4 layers on each side. You can also buy diapers in 4x6x4 or 2x4x2 depending on how much absorbancy you want. I don't go any less than 4x8x4. I also don't use pins. What's great about prefolds is they will fit into a wrap very easily. Just fold into thirds, slip into a wrap, and slip under baby, velcro up. I like the Bummis Super Whisper wrap. (Look at the www.organicbebe.com diaper packages.) I had no idea what I was doing when I decided to use cloth diapers. I placed several posts similar to this one (Kara_PA is a lifesaver!!!) to get a general idea of where to start. Like you, I wanted to use them for financial reasons and because they're better for the environment. I hate seeing all those disposables going into the landfill. I guess this is how I'm doing my part to help. My folks used cloth diapers so I got a lot of help from them. They taught me about the presoak and how to diaper the baby. Things have changed since my brothers and I were babies, but the basics are still the same. Some people don't like cloth because the clothes fit bulkier. That is true, but it's not that bad. Besides, I figure if I'm taking DD anywhere that really matters she'll be in disposables anyhow! Who cares how their clothes look around the house! If you do decide to cloth diaper you will go through all kinds of trial and error and find a system that works for you. And, like me, your system might even change a little until you're comfortable with what you have. We had several fitted and all in one diapers on hand until I decided they weren't that much better and I couldn't justify the cost. An all-in-one Bumkins diaper costs about $11 (give or take). It will last about 6 months according to the manufacturer. You can buy disposables cheaper than that! So, I sold all of my all-in-ones and fitted diapers on ebay! Don't hesitate to ask more questions! Good luck to you!

It is hard to explain because there isn't one right way to wean. You just kind of take it one day at a time. Don't think of the big picture, think of one nursing, one day, at a time. Just something to consider, in a few weeks he'll be old enough for whole milk. I weaned my kids from breast to whole milk, skipped the formula. I actually started giving #2 and #3 whole milk a few weeks before their first birthday, but that's not the recommendation of pediatricians, so don't do that just because I did. My point is, it might be easier, if you can tough it out a few more weeks, to do that switch all at the same time instead of weaning him to formula in a cup, then switching the game on him to milk. He might go along with it better. Wether you start tomorrow or next month, I think I'd start with that 11:30 nursing, try to elimate that one first. Instead of nursing, feed him regular lunch and give him a sippy cup. I'd skip the whole bottle thing, he can learn the cup as well as he can learn the bottle and you won't have to figure out how to wean him off the bottle in the near future. If the cup is tough for him, try the sipper bottles with a straw. Feed him lunch, whatever balanced choices you usually offer him, and the cup of formula/milk. My kids only drank a few ounces from a cup when they were eating foods. When you've got that nursing eliminated, start replacing the 4:00 one with a little snack, graham crackers and milk/formula or something like that. If he is in the habit of nursing and wants that routine, try doing something active and fun after his meal to distract him, or cuddle up and read a book. Then he still gets the mom time, it just doesn't come with food or require you to undress. :o) I had more luck during that time if we weren't home during those nursing times. If we ate lunch out or at a park, he/she was distracted and never thought about nursing.

kaylaurus - I really didn't hate the look of the cabinets, the floor, and I didn't even mind the laminate (except where it was missing). As I looked at the progress on the cabinets today, there are areas that are really just a small swap and some that are a large swap. I worried that DH was picking cabinets that were too similar to the old ones when he was looking at a particular shade of maple. But honestly, the natural cherry is far closer to them than that maple would have been. And that's okay, because, I too, liked the wood. It was just SO. DARK. The only kitchen light you can't see in those before pics is another of those anemic squares. Why we didn't re-do the lighting years ago is still a mystery to me. And it was SO non-functional/wasteful. The U inside the peninsula area wasn't bad, but beyond the peninsula was a wasteland of junk. Always. There were too many reasons for it NOT to be. A cleaned off deck/patio/porch sounds great. I definitely should have done that so we'd have had it to use when we were living with all the cabinets in the living room. Terri - when you said 'a quick roll-over' I thought lint roller...which is what it would mean at my house. :) Obviously, something much more lasting than de-dog-hairing. TG - Awesome to hear about the laminate work. I had a roommate once who built an awesome desk. I always thought...I could do that! But I have never come close after that. Installer left a little while ago. He. was. awesome. I'm very impressed. And in the 'stuff I got done' part of things, besides switching the W/D (still haven't cancelled the ASKO, playing phone tag with that salesman) I also ordered my UCL from Environmental Lighting. It'll ship Monday, I'll have it Tuesday. I also talked to my granite guy (early enough in the day I thought we'd template Tues or Wed, but I texted him later and said it could be as early as Mon (hopefully he can do it Mon). And I talked to the guy I ordered the fridge, range, and vent hood from and talked about what I should look for spec wise from these guys (since I've had to watch them on some things) and asked about who does what part of the hood/venting/roof cutting. When we had our roof done in the spring, the roofer said to just let him know when we were getting the new kitchen and he'd come cut the roof so he knows it was done right, but I'll have to ask him if his guys do the ducting too. This post was edited by cal_quail on Fri, Jul 25, 14 at 21:35

Don't bother misting it. You can't most enough to compensate for 16% humidity, and you might actually be increasing water loss in the same way our hands dry out badly in the winter if we do anything with water - evaporating water molecules On the surface adhere to water molecules in the tissues and draw them out. Im pretty sure it also happens in plants. I have only my tiny phone screen to view this, but am I seeing some leaves that are brown at the base, or brown in the middle rather than just at the ends? Are the leaves turning yellow before they turn brown? It doesn't look like it to me. I also don't see any wilting, and the dying leaves aren't mostly at the bottom. If I'm seeing it correctly, there are areas of dead/dry/brown tissue all over the plant, but there are no yellow leaves and the plant isn't wilting. To me, that makes a watering issue unlikely, too much water will turn leaves yellow and/or cause wilting. Too little water will cause wilting before leaves turn brown. I know of only two or three things that cause tissue to die right in the center of long leaves while leaving the bases and ends of the leaves green (temporarily, anyway): freezing or sunburn, sometimes heat can do it. Are you certain there isn't any direct sun on it? The sun is low this time of year so the sun's rays reach farther into windows than when it's higher. Direct southern sun is currently coming over 20 feet into my apartment. In the summer it's only about 2 feet. Are you home often enough to know for sure it hasn't gotten scorched? Are you sure it's out of the way of any heat source? Going completely dry twice in two weeks seems strange to me, but if you're humidity is only 16%, maybe that's not so odd (70% in my cool apartment in the gloomy Pacific NW). Don't let it go completely dry. I hear people refer to completely dry often, and I'm not sure they really mean completely dry. If it is completely dry, then root hairs and whole root systems will die and the plant won't be able take up water when it is watered, and then it will rot, if you poke a pencil all the way to the bottom of the pot, there should be some evidence of moisture when you bring it back up - even just a cool sensation when you touch the pencil to your upper lip, but preferably a wee bit more than that. If you really have been letting it go bone dry, as another poster stated, hydrophobic growing media will be a problem, and those spots might be killing sections of root. Soak the whole pot in a bucket of 70-90 degree water for about 15 minutes or until the pot sinks and it no longer bubbles, then resume watering Normally but don't let it dry out so much between waterings. You haven't fertilized it or anything, have you? Fertilizer burn will quickly cause brown tips in plants with no wilt or yellowing. Don't fertilize until it's actively growing in spring. Last question: it wasn't near heat in the nursery or store, was it? A couple months ago my local Walmart had the overhead heating system on full blast in the semi-outdoor garden center...and they had dozens of plants just a couple of feet from red-hot heating elements. I couldn't hold my hand above the plants for over a few seconds without becoming uncomfortable. Of course, all those plants formed large dead areas within a few days, but I'm certain many unwary people brought them home first and couldn't figure out why their plants were drying suddenly just days after purchase.