A message from the failed-post pile

This morning Law Student Hot Mama gave me an award on her blog with the hopes of prodding me into finally writing a new post. But since it looks like I won’t have time to write anything new until approximately the year 2028, I turned to my folder of failed blog posts. I wrote the following post a few days ago but realized that it was fatally flawed, thankfully before I made the mistake of publishing it. However, it does make me look like an uber-nice person, even though I’m not, so I figured it was a good one to resurrect. If nothing else, see if you can spot the major gap in logic before the end of the post.

Here it is:

As you may know from reading the comment I left on my post “Off the sauce,” I’ve gone back to feeding my baby breast milk. I’ll tell you the whole tragic story as soon as I get some free time (um, maybe after my baby graduates from college?), and in the meantime, I have this for you:

Before I fell off the formula-wagon, a friend of mine gave me a can of formula that expires next month. Since I can’t use it, I decided to donate it to a good cause. I did some research and found a homeless shelter in my area that takes in women and children and I decided to donate the formula to them.

If you’ve been reading my blog for a while, you may remember the sock party I had at Christmas. If I seem more altruistic than normal toward the homeless, it’s because many years ago, in Providence, Rhode Island, I came close to being homeless myself. Some people who didn’t have much to give themselves helped me out and I’ve never forgotten the fear, the shame, and then the incredible gratitude I felt in that situation. Now that I have a baby, I can imagine those feelings magnified a hundredfold by women with children.

So when I set the formula aside, I got to thinking (which is always a dangerous thing).

I have a package of newborn-size disposable diapers in my closet that I bought before the baby was born, thinking that cloth diapers would be hard to use. I figured I’d use disposables at night until I got the cloth thing figured out, but it turns out cloth diapers are easy, so the disposables went unused. Thinking this would be a good thing to donate, I threw them into the bag with the formula. Then I remembered I have a bunch of baby bottles I don’t like, and I threw them in there too. Then I decided I’d e-mail some other women at my law school who are mothers to see if they wanted to donate anything, as long as I was driving to the shelter.

And then I started thinking some more, and here’s what I came up with:

1. Lots of parents have disposable diapers in their houses that their baby has outgrown.
2. The more disposable diapers I donate to a shelter, the fewer disposables people have to buy, and therefore the fewer get manufactured. This is good for both the environment and homeless moms.
3. Lots of mothers read my blog, and they may have unused formula, disposable diapers, baby bottles, etc. lying around their house.


And that’s as far as I got before I realized my mistake. Apart from being unedited and therefore somewhat awkwardly written, do you see the problem with this post? Was I really going to ask my readers to send me their unused baby items? Apart from having to give my real name and address out over the internet, the postage alone would probably cost people more than the diapers themselves. Plus, everyone would think I was trying to cadge the diapers and formula for myself, especially since I just wrote a post about switching to formula. So as good as my intentions were, it's a good thing I didn't publish that post because I would have looked like a complete idiot. However, on the rare occasion that I do something good, I feel the need to broadcast it to the world, so thanks to Law School Hot Mama for giving me the perfect excuse to publish the post after all.

Now everyone get back to work.