Ahh, diapers. Something you HAVE to use when a baby comes along. I mean, unless you live in a nudist colony. Then I'm not sure how that works. When Conner was born, I had no idea what a cloth diaper was. Never even heard of them until we had been at Fort Bliss for about a year. I met a bunch of ladies who used them and it really piqued my interest. We were just about to start potty training Conner, though, so I didn't think too much into them. We knew we were just going to go straight to underwear at that point.
And then I got pregnant again. Thus began the never-ending cycle of wants and needs for this baby. One of those was will we use disposables or convert to cloth. At first, we were all in just for the cost purposes in the long run. Then we went back to 'Well, it would be less work to just do disposables'. We decided I wanted to find a class to get more information before we made an ultimate decision.
I joined a playdate group called MOPS. While at my first meeting, I noticed that a majority of the women cloth diapered. Through MOPS, I found out about a non-profit program here in the area called Cloth 4 Everybum. I was able to get signed up for that class. I got a ton of useful information, including what I needed to begin with - where to start! They gave us a cloth starter kit with almost every kind of cloth diaper on the market. I was SO thankful, because now I can try out the different kinds and see which works best for us. The program is ran entirely on donations, so unfortunately there were no prefolds in the kit. Those are what I was most interested in. I'll get to that in a moment. Anyway, I plan to donate back whatever we decide to not use, that way others can have the opportunity to take this class and receive the starter kit as well. It's absolutely wonderful that they have something like this. The class was taught by Stacy and Amy from the Low Country Real Diaper Circle, the local chapter of the Real Diaper Association. Fantastic group of ladies!
So here I am now, with my starter kit and a little less overwhelmed by the idea of cloth diapering. Here are some points as to why my husband and I decided we definitely want to convert over to cloth diapering.
-Cost. We were at Wal*Mart and happened to notice that the big box of Pampers (the only kind of diaper our oldest wasn't allergic to) had went up by $10/box since we last bought any. Are you kidding me?! $30ish for a box that will last us a few weeks. Ridiculous. Especially when I can techincally diaper my kiddo from birth to potty training for around $400 with cloth!
-Environment. Did you know that disposables do not decompose? So essentially, they go to the dump and sit there building up over time, forever. Gross.
-No chemicals. These days, it's hard to find a true-to-nature product that doesn't have chemicals with all of these nasty side affects to them.
-Cuteness. Seriously, have you SEEN these modern day cloth diapers?! This is probably the reason why the 'cost' part goes out the window with most cloth families. They can't stop buying cute ones. Haha!
Now, this is not to say that I think disposables are absolutely horrible. As previously mentioned, we used them with Conner and I don't regret it. We just chose to do something different this time. The benefits are just icing on the cake! I stated before that my starter kit didn't have any prefolds. It did, however, have a cover. So I got home and started my interwebs searching. I knew I wanted to have more covers and prefolds. Again, it was what we had very first considered. After week or so of searching around, reading reviews, etc., we decided to go with Thirsties Duo Wrap covers with snaps and some unbleached Indian cotton prefolds. I also wanted to try out some flats after seeing one of the ladies who taught the class change her daughter into one. Same idea as the prefolds, but not as bulky. Here I was, with the knowledge handed to me and Amazon.com beckoning me to make my first fluff purchase.
I took the night to talk it over with my husband. Before I went to bed, I had placed an order for 12 prefolds, 12 flats, 7 covers, a large wet bag, a small wet bag and some snappis to hold the prefolds and flats in place under the covers. All of that is enough to diaper Lucas for 2 days. I would have to do laundry every other day, but I do that anyway. As for the added cost of detergent, electricity and water for the extra load I'll be washing, it'll pretty much be non-existent. We already use All Free and Clear, which is safe for cloth diapers, so no extra cost there. The extra load of laundry will barely touch our water and electric bill. I'll maybe see a few dollars extra throughout the year. Back to cost. For all of the items I mentioned above, my total came to $180.27. The covers and prefolds are the smaller size that should last him until he's about 9 months, depending on his growth. I'll have to buy the size 2 covers and bigger prefolds at that time. So add in an additional $120ish. The bigger size should last me until potty training. All together, $300. There are a few extras I would like to add, but those are just that, extras. They are not essential. But for the sake of argument, I'll add that in, too. I would like to get a diaper sprayer and a drying rack for our laundry room, for the days it's too crappy outside to line dry. That's another $50ish. I'm still under that $400 mark! I would have to spend approximately $3,000 to diaper Lucas with disposables, if he were to potty train around the same time as Conner did. So it's kind of clear there why I chose the cloth route!
Oh, and when they say that fluff mail is incredibly hard to wait for and totally exciting to get, they were not lying! I got my package today, a whole day earlier than it was expected to arrive, and did a happy dance! Not to mention the several hundred times I have tracked the package in the past week. I can not wait for my little guy to get here so that I can put these on him!
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