The bottom of our baby shower invite read: Cloth Diapers Desired. 

It freaked my family out.  Especially the Aunties who were prepared to buy us Costco-sized boxes of Pampers or Huggies as gifts.  In fact, one of my Aunties – who’s always been honest with me – came up to me a few weeks ago and said,

“So you REALLY want me to get you cloth diapers?” 

After I replied with “Yes, Auntie” she said,

“I give you one week.” 

It wasn’t the first time Ben and I had gotten that response, and it definitely wasn’t the last either.  There are tons of blog posts out there focused on cloth diapering, but I’ve decided to share my reasons for choosing to cloth diaper, and how I’m navigating the cloth diapering world so far, with you as another reference.  Hopefully it offers some type of guidance. 

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First off, my response to the above conversation with my Auntie was, “Did you cloth diaper?”  She said, “Yes of course, but that’s because I had my kids 30 years ago and we had no other choice.” 

To that I said, “Exactly!  There’s so much waste produced by disposables and we’ve become so lazy nowadays.  It really doesn’t take a crazy amount of effort to cloth diaper and it’s irresponsible to just keep filling the earth with rubbish.  If Ben and I start off cloth diapering, it’ll be normal to us because we’ll never know any different.  To us, there is no other choice, either.  It just is what it is.” 

[Tell me that’s not absurd!]

Other reasons Ben and I chose cloth:

• cloth diapers are chemical-free and better for baby’s health
• cloth diapers are much more cost-efficient than disposables [yes, they’re an investment at first, but when you compare the two over the years, cloth wins]
• nowadays they make cloth diapering really easy – there aren’t even pins involved anymore! 

For those of you who get grossed out thinking about touching baby poo, I’m betting you’ll get over that pretty quickly once you have a kid.  It’s truly not that bad.  Plus, whether you like it or not, you’ll be touching your baby’s poo. 

Okay, so Ben and I decided long ago that we’d be cloth diapering – and we’ve always been excited about it! – but the actual process of figuring out which cloth diapers to purchase was definitely overwhelming and daunting.  It’s wonderful to have so much selection out there, but when it comes down to it, I truly feel like it’s all going to come down to personal preference and be trial-and-error. 

Personally, I feel that the most valuable resources I have are other Mamas, so I sought the guidance of the Mamas I knew to be cloth diapering to see what they thought worked best.  I scoured my fellow bloggers’ sites for details, sat down with a few friends with kids to see how the diapers fit them, and asked for support on the local Facebook Mom’s group:

I really appreciated the advice of others and was able to get a good list of brands I was interested in.  Then I decided the best idea would be to order a bunch of different brands and see which works best for our little one.  Once we get to test them out, we can order more of the ones that work best for us. 

As of now, here’s what we’ve got:

We got a dozen old-school pre-fold diapers with a pack of Snappis, and also a Thirsties duo-cover because we hear great things about them being durable and easy to care for [you can just rinse them with water and they dry super quickly].  Putting on the Snappis seems to be the simple, but it definitely takes more effort than the pocket diapers, so I think we’ll stick to these diapers during the day so that we don’t have to think so much during the dark hours. 

For pocket diapers, we’ve got two Bum Genius 4.0 with snaps [not pictured] and six Charlie Bananas with snaps.  Snaps are said to last longer than velcro for cloth diapers, so we made our main investment in them.  To make the investment last longer, we decided to go with one-size for as many of our cloth diapers as possible. 

Also, just to show you, pocket diapers have thick cotton inserts that need to be stuffed in and taken out of the actual lining of the diaper. 

Because we also want to try velcro [to compare and also for quicker changes], we got three more one-size Bum-genius in velcro.  I’m interested to see how the velcro holds up and also to see if these fit better/worse than the snap-fitted diapers. 

As you can see, we’ve currently got almost two-dozen cloth diapers, which I hear is a good number as I plan to have a container for soiled diapers and wash a load of every other day or so.  We do have a few disposable diapers just in case the baby is too small to fit into the cloth diapers to begin with, but we don’t envision having to use them for very long, if at all. 

Aside from the diapers themselves, Ben and I were gifted two diaper bags to place soiled diapers in.  They both look the same, but one is a wet bag and the other is a wet/dry diaper bag by Planetwise.

And for wipes, we ordered three dozen unbleached flannel wipes from Amazon.  We plan on making our own wipe solution [so easy!  You can check out DIY Mommy’s site for examples] and leaving it in an airtight container with or without the wipes.  When we need them, we’ll simply wring out the excess liquid. 

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Ben and I feel prepared, and it truly doesn’t seem as difficult as some people make it out to be.  Of course, everything seems simple and straight-forward in theory; we’ll see how it all plays out in practice once the little one is here. 

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How do you feel about cloth diapering?  Or diapering in general?

Let me know if there are any questions/concerns that you might have, or if you have any tips for me!

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