Cloth Diapering

We get asked a lot about Elijah's diapers. Cloth diapers are one of those things people don't know a lot about and tends to be thought of as old fashioned and icky. When Eli was in utero I was drawn to cloth as a way of saving money. I didn't do a lot of experimenting with brands or different systems that might have been cheaper, because if I didn't find something that worked well for us from the beginning I knew David would not be interested in venturing further into the world of cloth diapering. This led me to BumGenius, because we could see and feel the diapers in person, they had amazing reviews, great customer service and a good resale value- if we ended up hating them. I bought 4 Freetime diaper's, which are all-in-one one-size diapers. These were for the benefit of the husband, because they are made basically like a disposable, but it turned out he likes these the least. The other 20 are the 4.0 one-size pocket diaper. These have an "envelope" that runs from the front of the diaper to the back that you stuff with inserts. The only downside to these is that when it comes to washing you have to pull the inserts out and they are usually wet. It's never been an big issue for me and even David doesn't mind washing them. We end up doing diaper laundry every 2-3 days, which consists of one cold wash with an extra rinse, one hot wash with detergent and then line dry everything. We probably spend about 10-15 minutes- every couple days on cleaning them. It's pretty easy.

So, our two cents on the whole cloth experience is that it's great. We pretty much love it! It was overwhelming to know what to buy at first, but now that we know what we like we would never go back to using disposables. I was surprised to find David has turned into a little cloth advocate and loves telling people all about it. Who would have thought you could get so passionate about something thats sole purpose is catching poop? But, he says that he would choose cloth even if they were more expensive, because they work better in containing everything. I don't know if it's just our baby or all babies, but Eli has explosive poop and every time he poops in a disposable, which we occasionally use, it blows out the sides and top. (We tried many a brand.) With cloth we've never had poop anywhere, but inside the diaper. Maybe it's just me, but I'd pay big bucks for that sort of peace of mind. Plus we can see it as doing our part in "saving the world"- preventing thousands of diapers from ending up in land-fills and all that jazz. Not that that was really our motivation, but it makes us feel pretty cool anyway.