Cloth Diapering as an Alternative

You do have a choice, it doesn’t have to be all or nothing, and you don’t have to do it right away. When welcoming a little one into the world, it might feel like just another thing to add to the list to think about cloth diapering, along with the task of laundry every few days, but what I can say over a year and a half into our cloth diaper journey is that it is SO worth it. The environmental burden of disposing of every diaper your little poop and pee machine dirties adds up REALLY fast! (Let’s just estimate 8-12 diapers a day for the first few months, maybe 6 diapers a day after that and we’re talking almost 1,500 diapers in the first 6 months.)

Now don’t get me wrong, the technology used in disposable diapers is amazing; they absorb a ton and keep your little one dry! BUT that technology also means lots of processing and chemicals go into their making and I have read they can take up to 500 YEARS (!!!!) to decompose. Let alone the cost of buying and buying and buying diapers. (Those first 1,500 diapers cost around $300.)

How did cloth diapers look for us?

We did use disposable diapers for the first 3-4 weeks because of how quickly our son wet the cloth diapers and his brand new skin needed to stay more dry. After that first month we were all in until he started daycare at 6 months, and then we did cloth diapers when he was home. We have also used disposables when he has had bad diaper rash and needed the power of Desitin, which you can’t use with cloth diapers because all of the petroleum will stick to the cloth and lead to the inability to absorb over time. And when we traveled we have started to use disposables on travel day and disposable inserts with the cloth shell for ease of laundry at our destination.

So what do we use?

This is only our experience and we choose these based on our friends recommendations. We use Grovia and couldn't recommend them enough. We favor the hybrid during the day and LOVE the overnights and we used the newborn all-in-ones initially. We also tried Esembly and didn't like them for our son’s sensitive skin, because the liner isn’t just a pad and it all cotton vs bamboo or hemp, they kept his skin quite wet. We haven't tried any of the tri-folds, but from using the Grovia hybrid which snaps in, I couldn't imagine that the tri-folds would actually stay in place as baby moves more. I will admit we wouldn’t have made it without this sprayer and bucket for the toilet.

Learning and other details:

We did love Ensemble’s intro 101 class and learned a lot, especially the pro tip that the Dekor diaper pail with the laundry bag works best for the cloth diapers because the opening is bigger. And we use Esembly's laundering stuff - we got the silicone balls, use their detergent and use their laundry bags (we got 3 so we can rotate through them), we don't use the pail deodorant.

The biggest endorsement:

And the best testimonial is from my husband who did NOT want to do cloth diapers, but now can’t imagine using disposables and when we do use them he is appalled at how many we go through! My pro-tip here is that I convinced him we could have an added monthly cost in our budget for something he wanted, if he agreed to doing the cloth diapers. And we put most of them on our registry to off-load most of the up front cost!

Leave any questions or comments and I hope this helps you decide to try cloth diapers even just part-time.