I just entered my bottled water’s label into Environmental Working Group’s database for Project Bottled Water. They are going to study where bottled water comes from, how it’s processed, and if it’s really worth the expense — but they need your help and a few minutes of your time.

Grab the nearest bottle and go here to enter in its label information: http://www.ewg.org/issues/bottledwater/

This is part of the Environmental Working Group’s larger project to investigate drinking water, which they do in addition to many other environmental issues.

What does this have to do with diapers? It doesn’t take much to connect many diapering choices to environmental toxins. I’m interested to see how we will end up stepping away from the industrial age choices like buying our drinking water in plastic bottles and covering babies bottoms with super absorbent polymers. It is all related. Once the inevitability of embracing renewable resources really dawns, diapering will again mean cloth diapering.

Eventually, it is obvious to me, we will start to see serious questioning of plastics . It won’t just be a matter of endocrine disruptors , precocious puberty, and banning of phthalates.

At what point do we say that we need all of the petro-chemical products we can get to stuff into the tanks of our SUVs? At what point do we face up to the health hazards of, for example, Super Absorbent Polymers next to our precious babies’ thinnest skin? When will we realize the importance of using renewable resources to deal with predictably reoccurring necessities like babies’ elimination?

Well, not yet. But, I am glad to see the beginnings of questioning plastics as part of the (not quite yet) mainstream conversation on the role of petro-chemicals in our lives.

So tiny they fit in your hand.

Quite a few years ago, before we began the diaper manufacturing adventure, a friend of mine gave birth to her baby more than four months premature. I still remember visiting him in the NICU, his bottom as big as a tangerine. He was as healthy as a 4 1/2 month-baby could be, but she ran into one problem that she passed on to me: find diapers because nothing fits.

The two of us had lived on the same street and cloth diapered our first babies together using exactly the same flat diapers. She knew I would get diapers she would like. I figured, how difficult could it be? Finding preemie cloth diapers was difficult. I found no fitted diapers, no flat diapers, and in the end I produced a pile of wash cloths as diapers for her 4-lb baby. The wash cloths worked, though the covers were much too big. The baby didn’t move around much, so he just had to put up with the giant covers.

The problem of preemie cloth diapers stayed with me. Once I began designing cloth diapers, I knew I needed a size small enough for a premature baby. The Firefly Diapers Extra Small is the result.

We have just stocked Extra Small in trim Firefly Quick Dry Diapers for daytime and extra layered Firefly Sleep Tight Diapers for nighttime. Check the measurement details.

We have quite a few Easy Wool diaper cover colors available in Extra Small.

And, you could always opt for future usefulness of the diapers by choosing a pile of organic cotton wash cloths to be used as diapers now and cloths later.