Firefly Quick Dry Color Clown Diaper peeking out of its new friend, a Fuzbaby Fuzbomb cover.

Six colors in all. It does make a parent smile.

I know that pull of a beautiful organic cotton cloth diaper.

This week, a long-time customer—one of the first customers of the original Firefly Diapers—made a nostalgia purchase. After years of cloth diapering several children, her baby is about to leave diapers. She’s revisiting her favorite brands. What a nice idea. She thanked me for not calling her “the diaper nerd that I am.” I wouldn’t do that, unless I called myself one, too.

How does one get caught up in the desire for beauty in what is really just a mundane tool to deal with a simple process? It’s just a diaper. But the thousands of women buying diapers in the Diaper Underground know it isn’t just a diaper. For me, it is an amusing canvas. A colorful diaper makes me smile. And I like to say to customers that when a diaper makes you smile as you change your baby’s diaper, when your baby is completely focused on your face, you both smile. That has to be good.

Today, as I packed a box ready to go, one simple little diaper caught my eye. Something about the combination of chartreuse and lavender just made me want to tuck it away and keep it. Organic cotton, organic thread, a little dye and some snaps. That’s all. But what a combination! We don’t put color in every one of the six layers of a Firefly Quick Dry Diaper very often, but when we do, we call them Clown Diapers. (As I write, there are a few left—available only by phone order: 1-800/597-0561. But, I may tuck them away for who knows what.)

I didn’t tuck this particular diaper away. It is safely in its box travelling across the land to some lucky baby. Maybe it’s just the purple green combination. That must be it. But sometimes, despite my own babies being out of diapers for years, I am reminded that I am just a diaper nerd, too.

Is your family caught up in the rush of going back to school? Are you either putting curriculum in place for homeschool or maybe buying clothes for children going to public school? I want to offer more curriculum resources. I suggest that you talk to your children about child labor.

We took up the subject of child labor when our daughter asked us about it. We borrowed films from the library—historical dramas and the musical Newsies. We read books on slavery and on the industrial revolution.

Since then, resources on child labor are much more plentiful. You can get historical information from the Library of Congress American Memory Project. This includes a great lesson plan for middle and high school.

Child labor is not, unfortunately, just a topic in the study of the Industrial Revolution in Britain and the postbellum U.S. South. Child labor is a current problem around the world.

Fields of Hope is a teaching resource created with U.S. Department of Labor grant funds. This is a kid-friendly site devoted to child labor in agriculture, with children’s experiences, global reach, and extensive resources.

The Child Labor Coalition is a national network for the exchange of information about child labor. The website is aimed at adults and includes surveys, bulletins, laws, and more.

The Clean Clothes Campaign keeps their focus on the international apparel industry. http://www.cleanclothes.org/ The organization has videos for loan, including Zoned for Slavery, the Child Behind the Label, a short documentary on child labor in Honduras (1994).

The Labors of Love campaign has a sparse website, but they offer a comprehensive list of curriculum resources along with other materials.

Read the Kids Can Make a Difference article about a 4th grade class whose “Justice Do It,” a play on child labor and sweatshops, was cancelled by their principal for being “age inappropriate.”

For general resources on helping children, UNICEF is always a good resource.

It just makes sense that you wouldn’t want to send your children back to school in clothes made by children who don’t get to go to school.

Have you ever considered jumping right into a sustainable lifestyle? Do you want to make more connections or educate yourself more?

I heard just today about Organic Volunteers, a matchmaking service between hosts and volunteers working on sustainable projects. What a great service! There are thousands of opportunities listed here: jobs, internships, and education in a variety of areas like building, arts, community, eco-tourism, forestry, policy and more. You can search by state to find those opportunities near you.

This is what they say about “Positive Environmental Solutions”:

“Positive environmental solutions are affirmative, rather than negative, responses to environmental problems. This first step to responding positively is to identify the problem and possible causes. The second is to create a measurable objective that focuses on the intended results rather than the methods. For example: Global warming is a problem and burning fossil fuels is a major cause. Our objective is to create a human settlement that relies on renewable and sustainable resources. Once the objective, or positive solution, is clear action can be taken to obtain that objective. How you obtain that objective is up to you but OrganicVolunteers.com is always here to help.”

I love seeing sustainable solutions like this that rely on making personal connections. If you know of more organizations connecting people in this way, please tell me all about them.

Are you preparing for a new schoolyear? Have you considered using our fiber resources with your children? Many of our customers homeschool their children, as we do. Are you educating your children for sustainability, focusing on relationships, connections, and contexts? That is systems thinking for children. When a Butterfly Sneezes uses common children’s picture books to emphasize systems thinking concepts.

Use what you have around you. We often use diaper industry examples to talk about economics. We use what we have nearby to explore science and history. You have fibers all around you. How about using fibers as a starting point for materials science. You could do something as simple as a burn test to determine what kind of fibers you are working with.

You could look at the lifecycle of a fiber. For example, how about a wool unit? Visit some local sheep, ask how they are raised, buy a fleece from the farmer, card and spin the fleece, dye the yarn with plants—or even Kool Aid , then knit or weave a scarf to wear this winter. If you really want to follow the whole lifecycle, you could bury the scarf at the end of the season, then dig it up again in the fall to see what’s left. (We found: nothing.)

Or put particular fibers in historical context. When talking about U.S. history, hemp plays in interesting and important role in the American Revolution (Jefferson used hemp paper to draft the Declaration of Independence), many flags have been made with hemp, the first heavy Levi’s jeans worn by the 49ers during the Gold Rush were made of hemp, and during World War II the Hemp for Victory campaign encouraged farmers to grow hemp. Investigate the current hemp legislation with your children.

If you want more general resources on the need for sustainability education, try the Sustainability Education Handbook for K-12 Teachers funded by the Michigan Energy Office. There are many ideas and suggestions here adaptable to homeschool. Fritjof Capra’s Center for Ecoliteracy has a few resource suggestions, including a description of sustainability. The Cloud Institute for Sustainability Education has a monstrously huge list of links for sustainability education.

Two of our favorite sources for science education materials are Acorn Naturalists and their dense, lush catalogue, and Lawrence Hall of Science at UC Berkeley, whose GEMS (Great Explorations in Math and Science) publications we like to use. We’re using the Dissolving series to study chemistry this year.

Good luck in exploring fibers and sustainability with your kids. Tell us how it goes.