Day 20: Cloth Diapers

As mentioned in the previous post, we cloth diaper our children.  This is not a new thing for the year, I just wanted to use this space/time to go into a little bit more detail and tell you why we do it.  It is also my personal challenge to be less slothful and continue using them on a regular basis. (You see, sometimes we get lazy and go a few days using disposables.)

We began cloth diapering shortly after we bought our first home when our oldest daughter was 3 months old.  My cousin first told me about cloth diapering, as she cloth diapers her children.  She also began my stash and helped me learn all the ins and outs of the CD (cloth diaper) world.  If it weren’t for her letting us borrow all she did, we never would have started.

We aren’t huge environmentalists or anything – we just like to save money. 

We started out using some prefolds with snaps and covers.  Then Aimee (my cousin) sent us some all-in-ones and we were in love.  Our favorites were bumgenius!  My husband only likes all-in-ones.  Then we learned about pockets.  They are similar to all-in-ones.  Once we had a little stash, I began searching on the local facebook swap/sell/trade site.  Gross, right.  Wrong.  Second hand diapers are the best.  They are so cheap!  So I bought a few of my own.  We also invested in a huge stash of prefolds, two wet bags and some cloth wipes from a friend of ours.  We now have a pretty wide collection of all sizes of diapers. 

I LOVE cloth diapering.  It is rewarding.  Not only to know that I am helping save our family money, but it is also nicer to know that less chemicals are on my baby’s behind, less trash is being sent to the dump, they are super-duper cute, and they are a bit addicting.  I also find it rewarding to fold them and organize them nicely in the kids’ room.  It’s okay, you can call me a freak.

What don’t I like about cloth diapering?  Poop.  Baby poop changes a lot.  If it is pebble-poop, I get excited because it drops nicely into the toilet.  If it is runny-poop, I cringe.  And when it is poop-five-times-a-day-poop, I cry…and then I use disposables for a while.  Seriously though, all the contact with poop is worth it.

Here are some photos of our cloth diaper collection: