Poop Happens - Our cloth diapering experince

[I wanted to start recording some of the Mama choices I have made as we try to make our lives more eco friendly, and "natural". I will be posting them with the label 'Granola Mama' (sorry Clayre, I totally stole that from you, but it's such a great description) In the future, you could search that term and find all the posts that apply. As a disclaimer, we make these choices because we feel they are the best for our family, they are not a judgement or criticism of the choices you make for yourself and your families, however, if you are considering making some of the same choices I hope these posts will be an honest account and perhaps an encouragement for you to take the plunge and try it!]

Cloth diapers. I confess, when I very first heard people taking about cloth diapers my mind went to the huge scary nappy pins and crunchy plastic pants - as a baby my plastic over pants had ruffles on the bottom to try and disguise their ugliness! I digress. Today we have disposable diapers, why would be go back to using old fashioned cloth?

That's just it, they are no longer old fashioned in fact the cloth diaper industry is bustling again and there are many brands and types of diapers on the market today all ready to snuggle your little ones bottom in soft cotton with the promise of simplicity for the Mama. But could it really be done?

I feel blessed that before I got married I lived with my friends who had a baby and chose to cloth diaper. I saw first hand how the diapers worked and how little extra work they seemed to be. I imagine without this example, even my friend Nikki who is a huge cloth diaper advocate would not have been able to convince me to try them!

 Fast forward a bunch of years and my belly is swelling with baby and we are making our registry. Now's the time to decide, do we want to cloth diaper? I decided that we should bite the bullet and J was willing to support my decision. Pretty sure at this point he was still under the illusion that he would ever be changing diapers of any sort anyway :) The initial output in  much more than  a packet of disposables, I think originally we spent about $200. We were also gifted 4 diapers. But J did the math cloth vs. disposables and figured out that if we used the cloth diapers for 3 months we would break even on our investment. I think this shorter time frame made it seem less daunting for me, if it really didn't work for our schedule then I only had to get through a few months.

I had heard that often newborns who are peeing so much all the time sometimes don't dot hat well with cloth diapers right off the bat because their little buns are just too teeny. We decided that we didn't want to invest in newborn cloth diapers because we were expecting that our little bug would be a pretty big baby who would outgrow those puppies in a heartbeat. We got some newborn disposables which we used foe the first month. At this point, I realised we would be travelling to Florida and then to England in just a few more weeks so I took teh easy route (at least it was that in my mind) and continued to use the disposables. When we returned from all our travels, in mid November we began the cloth diapering in earnest...and we haven't looked back!

I cannot believe how easy it has been to throw in a load of laundry every couple of days which is pretty much all there is to the cloth diapering. I am a little miffed at myself for not biting the bullet and starting earlier, I think I had decided it would be a disaster so I didn't bother trying. If there is a next time, I think we might give ourselves a week or so or until the baby reaches the 8lb limit but then we'll try it.

There are so many options for loth diapers out there but we went with Bum Genius 4.0. Both of my cloth diapering friends used the Bum Genius brand of pocket diaper so when it came to making our choice, I confess I did little further research because they had had such great experiences. Our experience is just an additional good review.

I confess it has got interesting since we started giving Levi solids! The diaper sprayer that J fitted in our upstairs bathroom has come in very handy. I see why you need to wash the diapers with a little bleach every month to keep them fresh but I just mark it on my calendar and wash all the diapers in one go.

Our little man is a heavy wetter through the night an after some experiments we have stuck with overnight disposables for now so he stays dry. I am still researching cloth options. I have found some interesting reviews about using a micro fiber liner so I need to look into that more when we near the end of our disposable packet.

We have a mixture of the snap fasteners and velcro and they both work well. I think I prefer the velcro just because it's simpler and especially if other people are watching him they look very similar to the disposables.

We have hit our 3 month cloth diaper anniversary and I think we are still very much in love. I actually just ordered a few more so that I can make laundry an every 3 day event, ( I guess we are in for another month to break even now?!) Still, I love how soft these diapers are on the inside, against Levi's skin. We have been fortunate too that he hasn't suffered with diaper rash because you can't use the thick creams with the cloth diapers but we haven't had to explore other options because his skin is smooth as a baby's bottom. Literally.

All that to say, I love our cloth diapers and have had a very easy time using them. It works for us If you have any questions I would be happy to answer them from my somewhat limited experience.
Here is my sleepy boy showing off in his diapy diap.