Cloth Diapers 101: Making the Decision



After four months of baby-ness, I can finally say, with authority, that I love using cloth diapers! The following is the first installment of a little-bit-of-everything guide to cloth diapers. In this post I'll let you know how Justin and I made the decision to use cloth diapers, including helpful research information for those of you who are thinking about using them, but just aren't sure.

Research!
Justin and I found out about cloth diapers pretty early-on in my pregnancy. We were looking for any way to save money and this seemed like a great way to somewhat avoid the "babies are so expensive" feeling that was slowly creeping toward us. Before we decided to use cloth we did LOTS of research, which I highly recommend to anyone that's looking into it. There are plenty of blogs out there dedicated to cloth diapering. They have all kinds of statistics and reviews to look through for all the different types of cloth diapers, and let me tell you, there are lots of them. Here are a few places that were helpful research sites for us:

• Baby Center - This is a good website for pregnant folks anyway, but this page specifically gives a brief rundown of all of your options, as well as links to give you more information on what it means to use cloth diapers.
• Dirty Diaper Laundry - This is one of those blogs I was talking about that's dedicated to cloth diapers. It's got more reviews and videos than you could ever ask for. We visited this site a lot!
• Product Sites - when we started seriously considering a brand of diaper we would visit the company website. Obviously the sites are all biased, but they give you good insight into how the diapers work and the overall cost (i.e. disposable inserts, special detergent, sizing, etc.). Warning: These sites are designed to sell! You may want to google negative reviews after visiting the site just to give you some perspective.

YouTube
Another random but excellent place to go to research cloth diapering is YouTube. There are videos about all aspects of cloth, from organization and folding to reviews and time commitment. Here are a couple videos that we found helpful in the beginning:

Why Choose Cloth Diapers?

  



A Day in the Life of a Cloth Diapering Mom

YouTube is also a good place for the hubs to research cloth diapering. Justin found some videos made by other dads that gave him the male perspective, so that was good. I've read about some women doing cloth diapers without having their husband on board with it, but I imagine that's a huge pain in the butt. Just sayin'...

My Two Cents
If you're on the fence or are just finding out about cloth diapering as an option, you may be wondering why people would willingly give themselves more work to do when it comes to taking care of their baby (although I would argue it's not that much more, but I'll get to that another day). As I mentioned earlier, Justin and I originally started looking into cloth diapering because of the lower overall cost. I know there are some price comparisons out there that factor in things like disposable liners and laundry services, neither of which apply to us, so this is all relative, but from what I've read we're saving about $1500 over the course of Levi's diaper career by using cloth. Other benefits include the fact that cloth-diapered babies tend to potty train faster because they know what it feels like to be wet, they are better for the environment because you aren't throwing away large numbers of diapers each week, and the threat of diaper rash is slim to none. In fact, the only time Levi started to get a little diaper rash was when he was wearing disposables when we first brought him home. Since we transitioned to cloth we haven't had a problem with it. Finally, call me crazy, but I hate the smell of disposable diapers. I don't know if they're scented or what, but I think they smell like a public bathroom and I'm so glad that I don't have to mess with that on a regular basis.

Obviously, other things that you may want to consider are the additional loads of laundry you will be doing and the fact that you will most likely need to buy special laundry detergent for the diapers. Other than that though, and I know I'm biased here, I totally think they're worth it.

In future Cloth Diapering 101 posts, I'll explain some of the things I've briefly touched on above, but as a first installment, I hope this is helpful in providing some background information on how to go about researching cloth diapering and why Justin and I decided to go this route. If you have any questions, please feel free to comment!

And now, a gratuitous baby picture featuring, you guessed it, a cloth diaper (and a cute baby to boot)!