What Do Giant Maxi-Pads And Sasquatch Have In Common?

Let me introduce you to my ongoing hunt for the elusive “diaper doubler.” Are you familiar with diaper doublers? They are a fabulous little item that costs mere pennies a piece but can save a family trillions of dollars in laundry expenses. OK, perhaps I exaggerate the savings. But not by much.

Basically, DDs are like giant maxi-pads that you put in your child’s diaper to help absorb more, er, “liquid” so that you don’t need to change the diaper as often. I’m not kidding. Giant maxi-pads. I use them in Ginger’s diaper at night so that she can whiz to her heart’s content, puff her diaper up to the size of Texas, and not leak. No leaks = less laundry.

DDs come in cloth and disposable. Despite my green tendencies, and yes, I have them, I use the disposable ones. Please hold your hate mail because this will help offset my environmental sin: the disposable ones that I use have been discontinued.

Well goodness, we may be getting that pool we’ve always after all. Too bad it will be in Ginger’s crib.

So to avoid the structural damage to our house sure to be caused by having my darling angel wear normal diapers at night, my goal in life now is to buy DDs whenever I can find them at my local Babies R Us (“BRU”) while they are still available because I don’t see Ginger being potty-trained anytime in the next half-century.

Yes, my life is now focused on collecting giant maxi-pads. My parents must be so proud.

Well, it turns out that hording DDs is not an easy thing to do because apparently half the free world lines up at night in front of stores that stock DDs to buy them the moment the store opens. Ask your average 30-something SAHM whether she wants one child-free day with unlimited alcohol, a beach, a trashy novel, and a hunky servant named Luis to slather her with sunscreen every couple of hours, or a package of diaper doublers, and odds are she’ll opt for the DDs. Yeah, they’re that good. Why these suckers are being discontinued is beyond me because the manufacturer must be rolling in dough.

So recently I called my local BRU and was told that they had eight packages in stock. EIGHT! At 30 DDs per package, that’s 852.47 and 2/3 pi DDs total (my wild enthusiasm might be skewing my math a bit), which means that I don’t have to potty-train Ginger until she is 24! Jackpot!

GrumpyMomma (trying to sound cool, calm, and collected): can you hold them in my name until I got to the store to pick them up?

BRU sales clerk: Yes. Yes, we can.

GrumpyMomma: {doing happy dance and waving my hands in the a-yer like I just don’t ca-yer}.

So I load the kids up, which itself is an adventure, trek over to BRU and proceed to be sent all over the store in search of the elusive DDs. I ask several people for help and finally someone who seems to have some authority disappears into the back of the store.

A full half hour after I originally arrived at the store, she emerges to tell me that (1) they have nothing being held in my name; (2) they have no DDs in stock; and (3) they have no label on their shelving for any DDs so she doesn’t even know if they sell them anymore. Oh, and did I know they are being discontinued?

Talk about an Al Capone’s Vault moment.

After I stopped banging my head on the counter and corralled my kids, who at this point had practically set up residence in the furniture department because everyone knows that asking children to wait patiently for anything is like asking the sun to rise in the west, I posed the obvious question: how, over the course of a short period of time, did the store go from having 8 packages in stock to not carrying the product at all?

The employee simply looked at me and said, “I’m sorry.”

The thoughts going through my head at that moment are unprintable in this relatively family-friendly forum.

So my hunt continues. Occasionally I hear rumors of a DD sighting, but I no longer believe them. Sometimes I wonder if they never existed to begin with and I simply made them up in my desperate-for-less-laundry SAHM brain. If anyone has a photo of an unopened package, I’d love to see it because while The Truth might be Out There, the giant maxi-pads aren’t.