Saturday, August 20, 2011

Cloth Diapers: Getting Started

When I first heard about cloth diapers, a lot of thoughts entered my head. It went along the lines of:

Only crazy people with too much free time who love poop and like to stick themselves with pins would ever cloth diaper a baby when there are magical inventions called disposable diapers around.




Then I heard it can save you some money in the long run, and since we're cheap money conscience I decided to look into it. Here's a calculation on wipes I did...

Disposable wipes are about $0.03 a wipe. My favorite 'fancy' wipes are $1.60 a wipe. In about 53 changes you would pay for the cost of the reusable wipe. Newborns need to be changed about 12 times a day.  Assuming you use one wipe a change (HA!) you would pay for your 'expensive' reusable wipe in less than 5 days. You're welcome.

I'm gonna be honest here and say all of the wonderful reasons to cloth diaper like saving the environment and not putting plastic on your baby did not enter into my decision at all, but it's a nice bonus. I guess that makes me less of a hippie.


A little confession. I'm on the Bump. Since we don't have cable, it's kind of my reality TV guilty pleasure. Mostly, I get to sit there and feel great about myself because some other lady is going to name her child a horribly spelled made up name. I headed over to the Cloth Diaper board there and I thought my head was going to explode. I just stayed quiet and read everything they posted for a month and then one day I knew what OBV, GMD, and AIO meant. It really is a fantastic board, with great and helpful ladies, but it can be overwhelming when you are just getting started since there are so many options out there.

These are my favorite info sites, so I suggest you start there if you want to read up.

Abby's Lane: Cloth 101
Green Mountain Diapers: New to Cloth Info
Cotton Babies: Cloth Diaper Basics
PinStripes and PolkaDots: Diapering Basics

See here for the brands we use.

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