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Saturday, January 22, 2011

Topic: Cloth Diapering



We have been cloth diapering Ollie since the second week of November, 1 week after his cord stump fell off. Since March of 2010 I've been reading CD websites, blogs, communities, messege boards, facebook pages, tutorials, books, etc. I spent most of my free time searching new things out, reading stories of triumph and failure and learning everything I could. I decided not too long after some research, based on our income/budget, prefolds and covers would be the best route. They're easy, cheap, and virtually indestructible. It was a no-brainer. I decided to buy a starter package off of a Thirsties seller on Ebay. It took months for me to finally get everything we needed, but finally on the day I went in to be induced, the last of our "stash" came. Our stash consist of...
-36 infant Chinese bleached prefolds
-6 Thirsties duo wraps
-4 Thirsties one size wraps xs
-5 fitteds
-1 aio
-2 small travel wetbags
-2 large wetbags
-6 doublers
-10 fleece "liners"
-2 fuzzibunz polar fleece m
-countless wool shorties/longies

Our friends and families thought we were nuts. They said it was gonna be horrible, stinky, and annoying. They were wrong.
The first day we decided to just do a test run and see if we were comfortable. I was hesistent at first, it seemed so foreign now after those first 4 weeks of using disposables. Folding the prefold was an easy desicion to make after changing my squirmy worm in sposies. I had bought Snappis, but he was too fidgity to keep one in place for more then a millasecond. The first time trying to get it all in place and everything tucked in was annoying, and sometimes when he's really upset, it's annoying then too. But the money we save is amazing, his tush doesn't get rashes, he's happier, were happier, and he looks so damn cute in them lol. It's a fairly simple change too. When we go to change him we see if he's pooped or peed. If he peed, we take out the prefold, put in the wetbag and replace his wet one for a dry one inside his cover. If he's pooped, we change him while keeping the diaper aside. Then we and wash the poop off in the sink and wipe down the sink after. Then the diaper goes in the wetbag with the other diapers. We use disposable wipes still, we just throw those away. The only real thing to keep in my mind is the creams you use. There's a long list of things like Vaseline, baby powder, desitin that will RUIN cloth diapers. We use Balmax and California Baby Calming Diaper Cream. We've never had a problem with either. Like I said...simple.
Some people think we spent our lives doing laundry because we CD. The truth is we don't do wash every day, or even every other. It's about every 4th day. So if I wash on a Wednesday, te next wash would be Saturday. It costs $3.25 every time we do wash. Which if you do the math compared to a 50-60 pack of diapers EVERY week, it's a lot less obviously.
Wash is also fairly simple. The only thing to keep in mind again, is there is also a long list of detergents that can ruin cloth diapers. Most free and clears are fine. We use Purex 2x hypoallergenic free & clear. For about 24-30 diapers you only need about 1/3 of a cap of detergent. If you use too much, you'll be rinsing them...a lot. They should pretty much smell like nothing. No soap smell. The other things to stay away from are tons of bleach and dryer sheets. We use a small amount of bleach every month just to dissinfect. Our wash goes like this... Diapers and covers go for a 1-2 hour soak in our bathtub in ice cold water with a cup of baking soda. Then they go in the washer on hot/ cold high agitation cycle with 1/3 a cap of Purex. Then the diapers go in for a hour in the dryer and the covers go in for the last 15 minutes, but sometimes we just hang dry them, and sometimes we hang dry everything to give them a break. It's that easy.
We haven't *mastered* the art of travel clothdiapering, but we've done it once or twice and even gotten family involved. Once we show them how easy a diaper change is, they usually wanna try it out for themselves haha.

Here's a list of all the websites I read/have read. They all serve their purpose in what info they give. I couldn't haven been such a good clothdiaperer without them : )

Thirsties

green mountain diapers

pin stripes and polka dots

diaper pin

diaper swappers

pin stripes and polka dots detergent list

info about apartment CD'ing

livejournal clothdiapering community

<3

4 comments:

  1. Good luck! :) I'm on my second cloth diapered baby and we love it.

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  2. Haven't done this with our previous three, but with our fourth, I'm giving it some serious thought! Just wondering if the diaper service might be just as cost effective as buying the stash and washing the loads? I've gotten spoiled by the "hassle-free-ness" of just tossing the disposable in the can and not giving it a second thought. However, I am really considering the big switch to cloth diapers. Are all brands about the same other than cost? I want to give this a fair shake and hopefully can find one that will change my pre-conceived notions that all cloth diapers leak! :)

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  3. If you're really interested do some reading! There's a community I'm part of on LiveJournal called Clothdiapering (duh lol) and they have been a HUGE help in deciding things and answering my questions, their amazing. It's a closed community so you'd have to join. But to answer your question, no all the brands are different based on type, sizes, price. There are prefolds and covers, pockets, fitteds, AIO's, AI2's etc. And to be honest I've had WAY more blowouts with sposies then with cloth, think of it this way, the cloth absorbs and the sposies just kinda let it sit on top : / check out some of those websites^! they are SO helpful! : )

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