Ok, I don’t know what I feel most silly about – choosing to test out cloth diapers for the first time on a 13 month old, or standing above a set of baby underroos at midnight taking their photo.
You see, even though all the hype is raging amongst mothers to “go green”, the only thing that’s green in my house is the old romain lettuce in the fridge (and that probably isn’t green any longer). Granted, I do try to do my part every now and again to save the environment (such as that time 8 months ago I remembered to take my 2 cloth bags into Walmart with me). But typically, I’m too busy trying to stay sane with regular household duties to make myself remember all those new fangled “green” rules.
And diapering is no exception. I just love the ease of disposables, and the thought of dunking a poopie white towel in the toilet just didn’t appeal to me at all. After 13 months of using them though, I am now just as disgusted with disposables as the thought of cloth use to make me. They feel plastic, they leak during growth spurts, they’re expensive, they stink just as bad as cloth probably would, and our weekly trashbag consumption has tripled. Then there’s the not-so-subtle reminders from other “green” moms about how those nasty things don’t just disappear off the face of the earth when the garbage collector comes – instead they sit around somewhere else for all eternity, stewing in the poo’ey plasticy filth.
And they sit there stewing with all of their other millions of poo’ey friends that are “thrown away” daily.
So yeh, that thought started eating away at me the past month or so.
(That, and the thought of “Gee it would be nice to have a backup” that hit me in the face the other night at midnight when our disposables suddenly ran out).
With those thoughts doing a happy dance in my head, I forced myself started non-chalantly googling “cloth diapers”. There are so many sites out there who’s duty is doodie that it made research a breeze. Some blogs even make it their sole purpose in weblife to help clueless moms like me get their cloth diaper mojo on.
After a few hours of reading around (especially at the fabulous blog, All about Cloth Diapers), I had learned enough basics to get me started.
And you know what? There are so many different ways you can cloth diaper a tushy in today’s world there’s no reason not to give it a try at least once in life.
For one, there’s the old fashioned way. I remember as a little girl, I use to take rags, fold them in a triangle, and then pin them on my baby dolls as a diaper. (I tried that with Jack-Evan too, but discovered it doesn’t work). They have cloth diapers you can buy to use in such a manner today – they’re called “prefolds”. Now, why they’re called that, I’m not sure because they’re not pre-folded, in the way we would consider “prefolded”. You actually have to fold them yourself. Prefolds are nothing more than a large square full of layers of absorbant quilted up fabric – and it doesn’t even come quilted. You have to wash them in hot water and dry on high heat a few times to get them to quilt so they’ll reach full absorbancy.
This will be your main soiling area for your baby – the part that will catch all the yucky stuff. They can be folded many, many ways – from a square “tri-fold” to the “little girl putting a rag on her doll” kind of way. These come with no fasteners, so you’ll need to pin them, hook them with a plastic 3 pronged “snappi”, or put a cover over them to keep them from falling off. If you’re a folding-challenged mom, they also make “fitted” diapers, which (oddly enough) comes prefolded into a typically shaped diaper style.
Now….Those prefolded cloths are not spill proof and require some sort of waterproof lining if you’re out and about. Enter the “diaper cover”. The most popular kind are shaped like “disposables” complete with snaps or velcro, and are typically made of PUL or Wool, with wool being the more expensive option. You can get them in all sorts of hip modern designs and colors – or (if you’re a cheapskate like me) you can get them in plain white. Either way, I’m sure you’re baby won’t care.
Now, somewhere along the way, some brilliant genius (hopefully a mom) came up with the idea of combining the absorbant core (prefolds) with the protective outer liner and…
BAM!
An “All in One” diaper was born. Those are expensive though to start out with. After looking all over google & Etsy.com, I found the average price to be $20 for just ONE diaper. Organics, bamboo, and other exotic materials can jack up the cost another $10-20 bucks. But boy, oh boy, are they adorable!
There’s also something called a “pocket” diaper, which apparantly is an outer diaper cover that has – get this now – a pocket to stuff a liner in. This diaper doesn’t require a prefold.
If you have an extra heavy soaker in the family (Jack-Evan tends to be one), or you want to use cloth diapers for night time (which is what I plan on doing first), you’ll want to use what’s called a “doubler”. A doubler is nothing more than an extra piece of very absorbant material to put inside your prefold or All in One. Microfiber, hemp, bamboo and fleece seem to be pretty popular options for doublers. These too can be found in extremely cutesy wootsy fabrics.
And what do you do with these non-disposable diapers if you’re out in public? You put them in your ever trendy “wet” bag (a bag that is lined with waterproof PUL and can be dumped in the washing machine along with your soiled diapers).
So that’s what I learned.
I also learned that it can be super duper easy to get caught up in the eye catching fabrics and contermporary styles of cloth diapers and become far too addicted to how your baby’s bottom looks.
I’ll try not to let that happen to me….
(at least not until my next google adsense check comes in.)
