My friend Leah from high school perked my curiosity on cloth diapering. She cloth diapers and loves it. I think she is the only person I know personally who cloth diapers. I looked into it before we had our last baby.
I would not do cloth diapers to save the Earth, that sounds bad I know, but I am not a save the Earth type of girl. (Though my 8 year old did learn about recycle, reuse, and some other "r" in school last week and wanted to know why we did not have recycling bins. I told her we do not have any cans or bottles to recycle, what would we recycle? She now informs me everything I throw away, such as a cereal box or milk jug, it can be recycled! All right I am getting recyling bins! I use to go recycle cans with my grandfather when I was a little girl and I thought it was such a great deal because he would give me $50.00. I thought that's what he made from recycling but as I became an adult and tried to recycle cans once for an old lady and got like 8.00 bucks, I realized my grandfather was just giving me 50.00 because he loved spending time with me. When I realized this it made my heart break, I sure do miss him!)
But that's not what this is about, recycling, it is about cloth diapers! So if I am not doing it to save the world, why would I do it? To save money! Oh yes, we are a 1 income family with 3.5 kids, saving money is very important to me. So I decided if I could save money I would do it. But I would need a diaper service that washed the diapers, I was not going to do that part! When I looked into a diaper service and compared it to the cost of disposable diapers I was not saving any money. So I decided not too do it with baby #3. Now I am thinking about doing it again with baby #4 and this is what my friend Leah told me:
"Sarah, do
it .. it's wonderful for baby & the environment .. but the #1
reason I started was to save $! It costs a lil more up front, but
diapers quickly pay for themselves. Washing really isn't a big deal-
especially for exclusively breastfed babies (their poo is water soluble ,
so there's no need to rinse it away before doing a wash). Once baby
starts solids, we use (& LOVE) our diaper sprayer that attaches to
the toilet (no dunking & swishing here!). There's SOOOO many
options out there! what you see above on the right are one style of
fitted diapers that you snap around baby & then you put a waterproof
cover over that. We used fitted diapers on Sarah when she was a
newborn & then started using pocket diapers .. a little simpler for
Daddy :......
Well now she has perked my interest! So I ask my hubby last night what he thought about the idea and he laughed at me and said, "You know you have to wash them! You hate doing laundry! That will be an extra load a week! You can't even keep up with laundry the way it is!" HA HA HA! You are so funny hunny! I could do the extra laundry! It is really the spraying it down in the toilet that has me grossed out! Poop is so gross let alone scrubbing it in the toilet! So on to more research and pricing to see if it is worth it or not.
Any moms cloth diaper out there and has pros and cons for me?
I cloth diapered Grayson until he was about 6 months old, and then did it again for a month or so when he was about 8 months. We still use cloth sometimes. It's nice because he can't get his diaper off because of the snaps. What put me over the edge was the laundry and spraying poop. His poop was/is never very "plopable". It was more like peanut butter. But that wasn't a HUGE deal. They make disposable liners that you can put in the diaper (they are like TP) and then you just dump them in the toilet. The diaper sprayer IS nice to have, but mine got bumped and was left leaking into the downstairs through the floor. Ack! (My fault for putting the waste basket right next to the sprayer switch). Your friend is right, though. Aside from the laundry, cloth diapering is so easy when baby is exclusively breastfed. And the pail doesn't even stink!
ReplyDeleteAnyway, as far as laundry. We used mostly Fuzzi Bunz Perfect Size diapers, which I LOVE. They have the "cover" built in, but you have to stuff them with inserts. And I'm like you. I have a very hard time keeping up on my regular laundry because I do at least 10 loads a week! I had a front loader and it literally took 4 HOURS to do one load of diaper laundry. I had to add 4 gallons of extra water through the soap dispenser to get enough water to really clean them. (Since my front loader was High Efficiency and didn't use much water). Some people don't have this problem, but I guess I'm picky about getting them really clean. Needless to say, I got REALLY burnt out on doing diaper laundry.
All that said, I am going back to cloth once this baby comes (maybe sooner). I sold my front loader and got a regular old top loader that uses tons of water. LOL I'm not a huge enviro-nut, but I DO see the benefits in cloth diapering. It IS good for our budget since my boys are in diapers for close to 4 years! And I'm weird in that I like having something cute for my kids to poop and pee in. haha!
Oh, and I will add. The initial cost is big, but you can budget that out over the course of a few months. AND the resale value of most diapers is pretty good. jilliansdrawers.com does a trial, where you pay the initial cost and then they send you a bunch of different kinds of diapers. You can send back whatever you don't want, or you can keep/buy them.
ReplyDelete