Wednesday, October 28, 2009

Cloth diapering: One year of dissing disposables

Cloth or plastic? It's a question I considered with the birth of my second child. Was going cloth worth it if you could only do it part-time?

One year into our family's experiment, I can say that yes, it is. I'm saying as a mom who's juggled cloth through wiggly babies, tumbling toddlers and, now, the start of potty training, all-in-ones are a great resource for moms to have on hand!

When I first seriously considering going cloth at home (our day care insists on disposables), I did the math, and found out that if I went conservative on quantity and washed each night (which I was doing anyways on weekends), I'd break even in 26 weeks. And that's with using them twice a week.

I have had to buy new diapers as the little guy's grown, but I've found that by shopping around you can find brands of diapers that stretch longer across the sizes. Luckily, I found great resources like Toasty Baby, which even delivered the diapers to my home, Zwaggle, and Craigslist. Granted, the latter two required a lot of visits to the sites to find cloth diapers, but when I found them, the prices couldn't be beat. I got 5 cloth diapers for $20 from one and a set of 6 new diapers for the cost of shipping with the other! So for the cost of three packages of disposables, I was set for another six months or longer.

Soon, I got braver and added cloth wipes into the mix. And you can even get by without those, in all honesty. How many infant washcloths do you have lying around your bathroom?

Sure, I may have a little bit more laundry to do, but I simply toss dry diapers and cloths into a box in the bedroom. No folding's required.

As potty training has approached, I've actually found cloth diapers are easier to manage than disposable. He responds to wetness faster, and the cloth diapers don't tear or get ruined after multiple times of opening the velcro to use the bathroom. And my laundry load has dropped as well as we're having more success!

Would I go cloth again? Absolutely. Investing in all-in-one diapers are easy, and, after the initial expense, well worth the hassle!

1 comment:

Mrs. Hoppes said...

Very few of the cloth diapers we used were brand new. Maybe the first dozen. But the majority were passed on to me by other cloth diapering moms and I used them on multiple children of my own and then passed them on to other moms. (Some of the same ones who initially passed them on to me.)

While I do have my favorites in terms of style, I have successfully used pins and vinyl covers no problem as well.