There were a lots of surprises for me when I had my son
Some were hard lessons but I did have some really pleasant surprises. One was how easy cloth diapering was! I wanted to use cloth because I was looking to cut the costs of having a baby and it was of course a bonus that it would help the earth as well.
All of my friends thought I was kind of crazy to even try it. I thought they must be rich with the price of diapers and this was back in 2008. Our budget was squeaky tight so I could not imagine adding diapers to the mix. Also something most people don’t think about, here in Tacoma we pay more for a larger trash can and only have every other week pick up. When it was just the two of us, we got by on the smallest trash can. Disposable diapers would fill that up in a day. So I was determined to make it work for our family.
Which cloth diapers to buy?
I read as much about cloth as I could and decided to go for a diaper kit that had 36 small sized prefold diapers and 6 Velcro diaper covers with cute patterns of frogs and clouds and 100 washcloths to use a wipes. The kit and washcloths were less then $200. I was advised to wait till my baby had passed his meconium to start cloth diapering so I used the pack of diapers I got at my baby shower (I put my cloth diapers on the registry but did not receive any) until my son was about 2 days old.
I will say, a cloth diaper on a newborn looks huge. This is normal but does limit some of the kinds of clothing I could put on him. Pants were a no. We stuck to pjs and sleep sacks. As time went on, the diapers looked more normal but still bigger then paper diapers. In the cloth diaper community, this is referred to as “fluff butt”.
I remember in those first days waiting for the cloth diapers to get hard to use
I thought maybe it was putting the diapers on, but that was easy. We just used the “envelope fold” and stuck with it. No problems there. Maybe it was the washing? We just used a plain diaper pail with a plastic bag in it. When wash day came (about every 3-4 days) I would just dump the whole bag in the washing machine, put in my homemade powered laundry soap, and set the machine to “heavy”. When they were done, I took the covers out, laid them on the dryer to dry, and put all of the diapers and washcloths in the dryer. No problems there either. No crazy “rinse cycles” needed. Which was good because my washing machine had heavy, medium and light, no other options. It was easy. I didn’t even fold anything. Just laid the diapers in piles on my changing table.
Did we ever have any problems with cloth?
Only when my kids started to sleep through the night. Both of my kids were heavy night pee-ers so back to the internet I went. Turns out that is what hemp and bamboo inserts are for! You just put the inserts (however many you need) in the diaper with the prefold and tuck your baby in for the night. When our kids started solids, we found out you need a diaper sprayer. My husband went to home depot and picked up a sink sprayer for $30 and hooked it to the toilet. We would take the dirty diaper to the toilet and spray the poop off and then put it in the diaper pail with all the other diapers. When we traveled out of state, we would use disposable diapers and it never felt any easier for us. Either way you still have to deal with poop.
I spent less then $500 to diaper both of my kids from birth thru potty training
This includes the few times we bought disposable diapers. What about my water bill you might ask? Our water costs less then 1 cent a gallon here in Tacoma WA. Today my water costs $2.20 for 748 gallons of water. So no, it did not have much impact on my water bill. What about when we were done cloth diapering? Well, we kept the prefolds and still use them to clean up spills. Nothing is more absorbent then prefolds. I was able to sell the covers for about $5 each. I paid $11 for them so not a bad deal in the end.
If you are interested in doing cloth diapering but are not sure where to start. I offer affordable, private cloth diaper classes on Zoom to get you started on the right foot. You can read more about it HERE.
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