Wednesday, January 12, 2011

Diapers....Round 4!

As we prepare for the newest baby here, we had to return to the world of diapers. This time around we are going green and doing cloth diapers. Interestingly, it never presented itself as choice before (although, of course, it always was).

Why we are doing it....
1) Expense--up front, it is more expensive to set up your diapering system than stocking for a month of disposables however in the long run (2-3 years of diapers), it is way, way, way cheaper. No comparison.

2) Environment--it is clearly better for the environment to use reusable items than sending things to fill up landfills. Although it will add a laundry load or two to our week, it will not add anything to our garbage load (which we like to keep light---recycling and composting keep us to a bag or two per week).

This is a very big trend and lots of families are choosing to use cloth diapers, at least in some degree. So the products available are abundant.

If you are considering cloth diapers, you do need to educate yourself a bit. There are a few ways to do this.

*Ask around (I put a question to my friends on facebook and asked people who I know do it)
*You Tube (there are tons of videos on how to...)
*The Interweb (again lots of sources, Cotton Babies is a good start)
*Your local green store. Ours, B.Lime Baby, offers classes, rentals, products, etc.

So, I'm sure you will hear from us on how this new adventure goes.

2 comments:

The Fearless Freak said...

We did cloth with MF and it was great, until I went back to work. The daycare, despite specific instructions, didn't take care of the diapers right and I ended up having to do laundry every single night. Between working full time, going to school and having 2 kids (one who didn't sleep in blocks over 2 hours until she was 2), that kind of schedule just didn't work for me.

We did prefolds and Bummis covers, with Snappis. I couldn't justify the cost (even remotely) of AIOs and the pockets never seemed to work right for us. Bad stuffing, leaks, etc. The only time we ever had leaks with the prefolds was overnight. I think it was because she was a super wetter because we finally ended up with a very complex diapering system, that included disposables and layers of cloth and still occasionally had leaks.

Jenna said...

thanks for the input. we are going to try to use prefolds/covers as much as possible.

I am fortunate that the childcare we will use has lots of experience with cloth diapers, so I hope it works out.