Cloth Diapers

What kind of crazy person would use diapers that you have to wash as opposed to ones that you could just throw away?! Oh wait. I would.

WHY?!

To save the planet of course. Ok that's kind of a lie. I mean yeah, that's a great side effect but definitely not the primary reason I decided to cloth diaper. I was all aboard the Throwing Away Baby Waste train until I talked to my sister-in-law who opened my eyes to new ways of living. Turns out you don't have to do everything the way everyone else does it. Go figure. So if you're wrestling with the idea of cloth diapering, this post is for you.

5 Reasons I decided to use cloth diapers

1. Money

Cloth diapers are quite the investment to start off with. I would highly recommend throwing a diaper baby shower and asking everyone to bring one cloth diaper. Relatively inexpensive as far as gifts go but if it works out you could get your whole supply just like that. (I didn't do this but I did get half of my diapers as a gift.)

In the long run, cloth diapering saves you money. We decide to start out with disposable in the newborn stage and then transition into cloth. In the disposable phase of our lives we spent about $35 a month on diapers. Let's assume baby is in diapers for 2 years. That's roughly $840. Per child. A full set of the diapers we chose to use is $394 when purchased in a package. Those diapers can last through multiple children if you take good care of them. Let's say they last through 3 kids. I could save roughly $2,126 on diapers!


2. Potty training

Disposable diapers wick away moisture, so a child wearing them is relatively comfortable in a soaking wet diaper. Cloth diapers are...well they're cloth. So when they're wet, they feel wet. Many children have more success potty training after they've been wearing cloth diapers because they're sick of hanging out in wet pants. Go figure.

3. Diaper rashes or lack thereof

There are all kinds of chemicals in disposable diapers. There are significantly less chemicals in cloth. Babies in cloth have way fewer diaper rashes than those in disposable.

4. They actually aren't much more work than disposable diapers.

When my mom found out that I wanted to do cloth diapers she was appalled. She then continued by telling me horror stories of cloth diapering her siblings, diapers soaking in the toilet in her 1 bathroom childhood home and accidentally flushing diapers down the toilet resulting in an awful clog.

Cloth diapers are not like they used to be. They are made for convenience. Changing a diaper is as easy as taking one off, if there are any solids, dumping those in a toilet, putting a new one on and putting the dirty diaper into a bag instead of the trash can. Then every other day just toss the contents of that bag into the wash and you have clean diapers. No trip to the store needed unless you've run out of laundry detergent.

After much research we chose GroVia diapers. Read all about how to use them here.

5. They're so dang cute!

I mean just look at my adorable baby in her cloth diapers.