Lunapads Blog

As a follow up to Madeleine’s last entry about cloth diapering, I want to tell you about my experience with a diapering/pottying technique called Elimination Communication. To quote Wikipedia: “Elimination communication (EC) is a form of nurturing in which a caregiver uses timing, signals, cues, and intuition to help an infant address his or her elimination needs, partially or completely avoiding the use of diapers.”

When I first heard about this practice four years ago from a friend, I thought EC was too crunchy, bizzare and complicated for me - so, I dismissed it. By the time I had Garret, I had heard a lot more about it, seen it in action, and had lots of friends to ask about how they EC their babies. I’m not a hard core EC’er. I practice it part time, when I have my complete undivided attention on Garret and his pottying signals. I started EC when he was about 4 months old. When I can sense he needs to go, I squat him over the toilet and make a ‘psss’ noise. Behold, he goes! Well, OK, only sometimes, and only when he wants to. The most reliable times it works is: just when he wakes up, shortly after nursing, and catching him squatting or making his tell tale grunting sounds just before a BM. Needless to say, practicing EC cuts down on the number of diapers I need to wash. (Here is me and Garret in our hotel bathroom in Penticton last weekend. I’m happy to say we used only a handful of disposables on this trip. Otherwise, we did the EC thing or used cloth.)

(more…)

A couple of years ago my sister told me that she had started using a cup to catch her menstrual flow, which at the time seemed like the most crunchy granola thing I’d ever heard. I had never given much thought to what might be wrong with tampons or pads, and I definitely didn’t know there was an alternative. Two years later, I’m a huge proponent of The Diva Cup and all things Lunapads. Why the change? I guess you could say I had a green awakening about a year ago, and started swearing off plastic and paper bags, disposable cups and plastic flatwear. It was super-easy to replace disposable products with reusable ones, really just a matter of forming new habits. Then one day I was browsing the aisles of my local health food store and came across The Diva Cup. Suddenly the idea of a reusable menstrual cup didn’t seem so far out there—it actually made a lot of sense! So, I made my purchase and haven’t looked back since.
Well, that’s not totally true. Using The Diva Cup did take some getting used to after a lifetime of tampon usage. Difference #1: You actually have to touch yourself. Scandalous, isn’t it?! I’ve always considered myself a feminist and pretty comfortable with my body. But using the cup has made me painfully aware of how disconnected I was from the female parts of my body! Somewhere along the way, despite my intellectual beliefs, I had come to think of my flow as dirty and something that needed to be sanitized. I guess all those ads with girls running on the beach in white clothes had landed in some corner of my unconscious, after all. Difference #2: Using the cup, you get to see your flow. Amidst our hide it-clean it-bleach it culture of female “hygiene”, this is a radical moment. Not only is it simply cool to see the amount of flow, but there’s also something totally liberating about it being visible. It’s not something to be hidden away like a dirty little secret. Anyone who’s been in psychoanalysis knows that it’s what we keep hidden that is what really traps us, so taken on a cultural level, as long as our periods are something to be hidden and cleaned up, as a culture we’re ashamed about the essence of our womanhood. So, without question, using The Diva Cup has made me feel much more connected to my femaleness, and has brought me face to face with the sexist presumptions lurking in my unconscious.

(more…)

A gal recently wrote in to me at customer service asking about what to do with Lunapads while traveling:

Just recently, I was called out of town unexpectedly for 2 weeks. And I didn’t have time to plan how I was going to clean my pads “on the road”. And….well……let’s just say it was an “odoriferous” experience.The big problem seemed to be that I didn’t have a chance to dry my pads. I couldn’t hang them up to dry like I usually do because I was sharing a room with my parents (and my mother insists that I keep my pads totally out of sight.) Plus, we were changing hotels every day, which made everything hard.

While I have travelled with Lunapads I’m fortunate enough to have a boyfriend who had no problem seeing pads strung up on rubber hoses in our various hostel rooms, and I often use the DivaCup which means there’s far less to wash & dry than if I used pads exclusively.

While I did have some advice to share, I thought we’d get some further insight from you gals out there who may have found better ways to travel with cloth pads.

How do you do Lunapads on the road?…

In my last post I was grousing about parents letting themselves off the hook with respect to choosing disposable diapers. As with the 12 steps, my philosophy of marketing is more about attraction rather than promotion, which is to say that I’d rather tell you about how easy it is to cloth diaper than to give you a guilt trip. In my experience, a positive role model is unbeatable when it comes to these matters. When I had Genevieve I already knew that I wanted to use cloth and got some to start me off. But it was Suzanne (pictured is Aiden, in a limited edition Lunapads organic cloth diaper) who took me step-by-step through taking care of them. Over the years I adapted to suit my own living situation and would like to share my recipe for successful cloth diapering in the hopes in inspiring any fence-sitters out there.

(more…)

I have recently been evaluating my environmental consumer behavior and am coming to the unfortunate conclusion that I’ve become rather complacent and arrogant, resting on my Lunapads laurels. Being an eco-entrepreneur (in my case) can be a bit of an excuse - after all, I’ve done my bit to save the planet and then some, right? What started this ball rolling was an e-newsletter I received from yoyomama.ca (highly recommended for Vancouver Moms who want to get the lowdown on everything from sample sales to local family-friendly events) entitled “the Great Diaper Debate”. I was intrigued to check out the writer’s perspective, but then disappointed to find that the extent of the “debate” only covered a comparison of 2 brands of unbleached disposable diapers. I fired off a huffy email to the editor letting her know that whether disposable or cloth diapers are greener is far from debatable, and lamented to Suzanne how framing it as a “debate” allows parents who choose not to cloth diaper to feel like they weighed 2 equal sides of an argument and made the most responsible choice.

But here’s the kicker: I use disposable (unbleached, but still) diapers on my daughter at night and while she naps. While I was pretty diligent with using cloth diapers (I even made my own wipes!) until she was about 2, she has now started to toilet-train. Having outgrown her toddler sized diapers (now donated to Suzanne’s baby Garret) we are using 2 disposables a day in the hopes that she will shortly be able to extend her daytime diaper-free skills 24/7. This admission has forced me to reconsider how green I really am.

(more…)

As many of you already know, we have just moved to our new office. It’s a huge but necessary step for us as we outgrew our old office quite some time ago. We were there for 7 years and it was great while it lasted, but on busy days when we had 6 women working, 2 kids playing, visitors, meetings and deliveries, it could get hectic! Our new office, decked out in walls painted electric apple green and hot pink (to match our new shelf packaging) features more space for desks, computers, a real fridge, lunch room and a soon to be installed new phone system.

A major feature of this new chapter in the Lunapads story is that Suzanne and I (meaning Lunapads as a company) actually bought this office (we previously leased), which brings a whole new level of financial committment and responsibility to our operations. Early on when we first decided to take the plunge, I looked at Suzanne and said “so I guess this means that nobody’s going anywhere for a bit?” She laughed nervously, but it was a big moment for both of us.

For all that this move will make our work life easier in the long term, it has not been without its reminders and lessons.

(more…)