After Mr. B peed or pooped on his 8th diaper by 1 in the afternoon I officially feel very at peace with my most recent diapering decision . . . cloth diapers.
Once you pick your jaw up off the floor, let me mention that I am not talking about using classic old school cloth diapers. You know the kind most people use as burp cloths? I am talking kinds that are super awesome, adorable, cute easy to clean, modern style cloth diapers. Please compare the two for a moment.
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| Classic Gerber Cloth Diaper with pins- this gets covered by a pair of rubber panty things. |
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| Vs. the cadilac of cloth diapers- Bum Genius- Freetime Diapers Look a little different? I think so. A lot different. When I was a kid my mom mentioned how cloth diapers involved pins that you could accidently poke your baby with (they had a friend who stabbed their squirming child). She also talked to me about how they used ridiculous amounts of water to clean. She also mentioned having to dunk poopy diapers in the toilet to clean them. All of these visuals were enough to scare me off, until a few of my friends started cloth diapering their kids and informed me of all the recent innovations in cloth diapering. Not only did they mention how totally different they now look, ie no more pins and multiple layers to deal with. They also mentioned such awesome inventions as a cloth diaper sprayer. Basically you rinse the poopy diaper off with a handy attachment that connects to your toilet. It takes 30 second. The same amount of time it takes you to walk a poopy diaper out to your outside trash can (to avoid stink). Finally, it turns out that the idea of cloth diapers taking so much water to clean them that they were worse for the environment than disposables was in fact a rumor (and absolute myth) started by disposable diaper companies when they first hit the market. So basically knowing all this, I think I can handle the modern cloth diaper thing. For those of you who know me, you know that I am ridiculously frugal. Even buying diapers at Costco, with a coupon. The 34 bucks a month is still hard to swallow for something you essentially throw in a dumpster, and goes on to sit in a landfill. If you have two kids in diapers that can be somewhere around 60 bucks a month. Yikes! Literally throwing money away, not something that sits well with me at all. I am all for disposables on the go and plan on doing that for awhile, or maybe using the disposable cloth diaper liners (what an equally cool innovation). Let the money saving begin. Now it is true that cloth diapers are an upfront cost based thing. It really can cost you between 150-400 dollars to buy enough to last you two days. This of course varies based on the brand you buy, how often many diapers you go through per day and such. But if you figure that babies are in diapers for at least two years, and a second kid can use the same diapers that amount will pay for itself quickly. You can also buy cloth diapers used or diapers called "seconds" where they have a slight flaw that makes them unable to sell for full price. My last and final hangup has been that there are currently 100s of brands that now sell awesome cloth diapers. They also sell at least 6 different overall types, a variety of sizes, and colors and patterns. How on earth is someone suppose to decide, or know where to start? Well you search the internet and find a company that lets you do the trial run of course. I found jillians drawers for a deposit of 165 dollars you get to try cloth diapers (9 kinds) for 21 days (they do not count the time it takes for them to ship to you or you to ship them back). 10 of the dollars plus the cost of you shipping them back is non refundable. Not too shabby. It costs me 20 bucks in disposables for 3 weeks so I figure I am not really out anything if I hate them altogether, or simply decide I want to buy different diapers from the kinds I tried. So yeah, I figure I have nothing to lose. Hopefully they arrive soon. I will update you on how I like each brand, and how cute Mr. B looks in them :) |
