Maker of the House

Recently my friend Jo made me put my money where my mouth is.  I’ve always tried to find new ways to be green and incorporate them into my life…but diapers has been one of those biggies that creeps into my guilty conscience quite often.  Until now, we had been using Nature Babycare diapers, which are based on a compostable corn product (buying them from Target online or Diapers.com).  I was able to stomach disposable diapers because we were part of the lucky American elite whose garbage goes to a composting facility instead of a landfill.  This was AWESOME but rather expensive as these dipes aren’t cheap compared to traditional dipes.  Nevertheless, I was living quite happily guilt-free until my friend Jo (who has a baby due in October) was contemplating cloth or disposable and I told her about the composting facility.  She couldn’t find anything about it so I checked the website and found out it CLOSED last October!  Tragedy and Disaster!   How sad that something so cool and so easy for everyone to be able to recycle their garbage had to close its doors!

Well then Jo challenged me….as we both know that even compostable diapers don’t decompose very well in landfills (better than traditional but still).  She said something along the lines of “if you (meaning you “super-trying-to-be-as-green-as-possible stay-at-home-mom”) can’t do it, how can I?”  Now if anyone can do it, Jo can, and if she can do it, then I can get a bug up my butt and do it too.  Ultimately, we made a pact that we would both try it out.  So thanks Jo, I’m so glad I did…and Evan is already, at such a tender age, filling out his shorts with added stuffing.  Ha ha, sorry that’s a groaner I know, but I couldn’t resist!  Anyway, woo hoo!

First thing I did was bust out the cloth diapers I got from my friend Susan (who can make the coolest diaper cakes, btw) and started testing them out on my little guinea pig.  Then I dove into the overwhelming world of cloth diapers on the internet to do some research.  Jo and I traded links, read stuff, bookmarked pages and chatted back and forth.

Here are the most difficult hurdles I encountered involving getting started:

1.  Too many choices — it is so easy to get swallowed up by the sheer volume of cloth diaper types on the internet.  For someone like me (who has to research everything) it can be completely all consuming!  There are prefolds (bleached, unbleached, contoured, Chinese, Indian), pockets, all-in-ones, homemade, factory made, snaps vs velcro, different fabrics (cotton, polyester, fleece, hemp, bamboo, terry…), one-size or fitted, even hybrids that can go with cloth or disposable inserts…I could go on but you get the idea.  SHEESH!!

2.  Too many opinions on how to wash — I won’t get into it here…it’s just too much.  But I’ll just say that just about every website has it’s own method and lots of them say completely opposite things.

3.  The expense.  It’s an investment, but the cost is a lot cheaper in the long run, especially if you can make them last through more than one kiddo.

So what has been my experience so far, and how did I get my mind wrapped around it all?  Well, first of all I will say this… I don’t know why it didn’t occur to me sooner that I didn’t need to buy enough to cloth diaper full time all at once.  I wish I would have realized that, because I probably would’ve tried it earlier in Evan’s life.  That spreads the expense out too (now I’m totally hooked and hubby is desperately trying to reign me in before I spend all our $$ on cute fluffy butt dipes!)  The only thing is, you kind of need enough to at least do a small load of laundry or you’ll feel like you’re wasting water.  Also, no matter when you start, you’ll probably still have a large stash of disposables to use up.  That’s how it is with us, so while we are getting used to it, we still use those at naps and nighttime.  And heck, even if you only do it at home…think of all the waste you are preventing!!  The volume of garbage going out of our house is soooo much less.  It feels DELICIOUS.

As far as picking a system, I looked at the best rated ones and got a few of each to try.  Right now we have Bumgenius 3.0, prefolds with Thirsties covers, 1 Fuzzybunz and 2 of the new GroVia hybrids…so a good mix of pockets, prefolds and hybrids.  So far, I like the GroVia’s the best (but they haven’t passed the Evan poop-slosion test yet…still waiting to see if they can handle one of those before they get the A+).  Hubby likes the BGs best (and I like those too, we’ll probably get some of the newer version in the next round of ordering b/c they are supposed to be sized a little bit bigger).  I think the prefolds are better to use with newborns b/c you need so many dipes for the little guys, and they are cheaper.  Also, harder to use on a mobile, squirmy toddler but they definitely get the job done at home where things are easier to deal with.

What about ick factor you say?  Well, maybe its not fair that my past job descriptions involved vacuuming poo out of aquariums and dicing up all sorts of raw fish…there’s not much that phases me.  However, in the past week and a half of trying this out there was one incident of grossness.  (Warning: TMI coming up).  It involved a non-plopable (yes, this word has been seen on diapering forums) poo that spookily resembled the melted snickers that was in a diaper at my baby shower.  It was my first experience with such a poo, but I was prepared with knowledge from the internet forums on what to do in exactly this situation… I yelled down to Mike, “can you toss me one those plastic butter knives from the pantry?” This would be the perfect use for a plastic butter knife…an invention I despise with all my heart… “scrape poo vile plastic knife!”  Unfortunately, I then had a poo covered object with which I had no idea what to do AND a poo smeared diaper.  What next?  Umm, dunk it in the toilet and swish?  This sounded like a bad idea, but it’s what I had read to do.  I gritted my teeth and dunked it in.  Oh jeez, not good.   Meanwhile Evan is running around wondering just what Mommy is doing and it looks so interesting!  This is not going well.  I resorted to rinsing it out in the bathtub (which subsequently needed to be cleaned out afterward as an added bonus), all while fending off said curious toddler who suspiciously began dangling his blankie and stuffed elephant over the poo soup mommy was making.  After that, yeah, I was feeling kind of icky.  Hence, our next purchase shall be a diaper sprayer.

I’m pleasantly surprised though that other than that one time, we haven’t had to deal with anything more than regular diapers.  Just plop the poo in the toilet and throw the whole thing in the diaper pail.  Then on wash day, empty the pail liner into the washer and everything comes out clean!!  We’ve been using Tide Original powder by the way despite all the cloth diaper companies declaring it 100% evil.  More than half of the moms I’ve found on the forum use it without any trouble and it works much better than the cloth diaper company approved stuff.  I started out with Allen’s Naturally (one of the approved ones) and I just didn’t feel like they were getting clean enough.  I decided I couldn’t keep going with it unless I felt like the dipes were totally clean!  So far, so good with Tide!

Anyway, we’ll see how it continues…but so far it’s been SO much easier than I thought it would be and I only regret not having tried it out sooner…we could’ve saved A LOT of money.