Cloth Diapering

Disclaimer #1: This is not going to be an interesting post for anyone who doesn't have kids, who doesn't use cloth diapers, or who is dead set on disposable diapers for their future kids. But I read lots of websites and blogs, and talked to a lot of people before we ended up with our system for cloth diapers, and since my sister is starting cloth diapering with her baby today, I thought I'd write up how our system works. It's amazing how many people ask about it when they see or hear that we use cloth diapers.

Disclaimer #2: We do use 7th Generation brand disposables for night time. They last a little longer before leaking than cloth, but other than that I don't find them to be any more convenient than cloth.

Why cloth?

• Cost: It's definitely the cheaper way to go (for 40 diaper changes, the cost comes to $5 for cloth (laundry costs-- we pay for each load) vs. $12 for 7th Gen disposables vs. $18 for flushable g-inserts). 
• Fewer blow outs: We've used 7th Generation disposables, and occasionally Pampers. The disposables tend to have more blow outs in my experience, and when a blow out occurs in the gDiapers, it's a smaller mess (poo has multiple layers to get through before getting to clothes). 
• Better for baby: While I can't say for sure yet whether this is true, cloth diapered babies are supposedly easier to potty train and get fewer diaper rashes. (We haven't had an incident of diaper rash yet). And the chemicals used in disposables have been associated with some issues in boy babies... not to be paranoid, but when it comes to my baby's bum, I'd rather avoid too many chemicals.
• What about the laundry: I don't mind the extra laundry-- I'm doing so much with a baby as it is,  another load is no big deal. 
• Isn't it gross?: Yes, you do work with poo a bit more, I don't mind it so much. (Kenneth says he has to remind himself every time he rinses a diaper that this is better for the environment. I remind myself that rinsing a diaper is quicker than a trip to the store... really, it's about laziness for me. Not all 7th Generation sizes are available on Amazon Prime.) 
• It's green: Less petroleum usage in packaging and distribution, and of course, you're not adding to landfills. 
• The theory that you use so much water to clean the diapers that the environmental impact of using disposables vs cloth doesn't hold much water (haha) to me. Washers now tend to be high efficiency, and water can be cleaned and reused. Land, not so much. Not to mention, come summer, we'll be line drying our diapers (we do with most of our clothes in the summer), so we'll be saving energy there. On top of that, the plastic used to package the diapers and the fuel for producing and shipping the diapers only occurs once for cloth vs many times for disposable. And you can reuse cloth on other children. Reusing disposables would be ineffective and gross... obviously. I think the debate on which is better for the environment is pretty well decided in favor of cloth.

How it works for us:

Our cast of characters:

cloth inserts (small and medium size), g-pants with liner snapped in

diaper sprayer

Diaper pail (an old trash can of Kenneth's), lined with a Kushies antibacterial pail liner. We also have a Munchkin baking soda filled "nursery refresher" glued inside the lid. So far,  no smell issues. If we ever do though, the pail will move outside. 

Flushable wipes

We use what I think is called the dry pail method. How it works is pretty simple. 

1. When a diaper is wet, it goes straight to the diaper pail.
2. When a diaper is dirty, it gets taken to the bathroom, and we spray poo into the toilet with the bumGenius diaper sprayer (which doubles as a bidet, if you're into that sort of thing). Some say you can throw the dirty diapers of exclusively breast fed babies straight into the washer since breast milk poo is water soluble. I think that's kind of gross and gDiapers recommend the poo be rinsed off anyway, so that's what we do.
3. When we're out, the cloth insert (and liner and gPants if necessary) go in a wet bag in the diaper bag. I take care of it when we get home. No big deal.

Washing:

1. When it's time to wash, the bag and diapers all go into the washing machine. We wash them on hot and use half the detergent we would for a normal load (per gDiapers instructions). We use Kirkland Signature Environmentally Friendly detergent. 
2. I throw the gPants in with the cloth inserts (and burp rags, and other baby things sometimes) in when I remember to. Most of the time though, if a little pee or poo gets on the gPants (usually once or twice a day for us), I just give it a quick hand-wash in the sink. I'm not about to do a whole extra load of laundry just to get the gPants clean. We have a small bottle of detergent in the bathroom for this purpose.

Wee little bottle of detergent.

What we found out that makes it easier:

1. 2 cloth inserts are really necessary, if you don't want to be changing a diaper every hour. GDiapers  only recommends 2 (hemp sides together) for sleep time, but I just can't change a diaper often enough to prevent leaks when there's only 1 insert. So, 2 it is. We rarely have leaks this way.

Double stuffed and ready for action

1. The diaper sprayer. OH man. We used to use the peri bottle from the hospital, which took for-ev-er to rinse the poo diapers. The sprayer makes a diaper change take a total of maybe 3 minutes, if that. I heard about the sprayer in this post on the Young House Love blog and it is as great as it seems.
2. The perfect number of gPants for us seems to be 6. When I hand wash them, they hang to dry in our shower, and it takes a day or 2 to dry. So with 6, we always have enough clean, dry ones on hand. (They don't get dirty every time they're used.) 
3. We have 12 medium cloth inserts and 24 small ones (thinking younger babies need more frequent diaper changes). Once we found out about the need to use 2 cloth inserts, we started using a small and a medium together rather than 2 medium (less bulk in the diaper + gets more use from the smalls). Right now, we do a load of diaper inserts about every 3 days.

That's it. Cloth diapering-- easy peasy.

In other news, we're sleep training tonight-- we're using the pick up/put down method to get Xavier to learn to sleep in his crib instead of with us. Heaven help us.