So, in honor of more than a year of cloth diapering experience, here’s a synopsis of my year raising a fluffy-butted baby.
I was a bit biased toward BumGenius 3.0’s from the get-go. I saw them in some schmancy boutique and bought one to bring home to Hubs to see what he thought. He shrugged and said they seemed fine, so I collected a total of fifteen Easter egg colored diapers before The Boy was even born.
The thing I liked about them was they resembled, at least to my inexperienced eye, a disposable diaper. I liked the idea of the only extra step being to stuff them with inserts.
Even though The Boy was big enough to wear them from birth, they looked so incredibly huge on him that I just couldn’t bring myself to break in the BG’s. After asking around, I learned that they’re meant to look like comedy pants so, at 3-4 weeks, we made the leap to cloth diapering and haven’t looked back.
The next step on our path to hippy-dom was acquisition of cloth wipes. If you’re handy with scissors and have some old shirts, you're good to go. I, however, splurged on approximately 30 tiny pieces of overpriced flannel.
At first I googled a wipe solution with which to clean The Boy’s precious bum – a bottle full of water with a few drops of baby shampoo and tea tree oil – but we quickly realized that water is all that is needed. Before removing a dirty diaper I layer a few wipes beside The Boy, squirt enough water on them to soak through the first and dampen the others. Hubs prefers to remove the diaper and, um, see what he's working with so he knows how many wipes to dampen. Either system works fine.
Butt cleaning and diapering solutions in place, I started experimenting with different brands of cloth diapers.
The first was GroBaby because of the cost. The near-constant peeing and pooping of a newborn meant that we had to use the washer and dryer daily. Wanting to have enough diapers to allow us line-drying time, I looked to GroBaby’s multi-use shell and snapable inserts as a more economical alternative to the BG’s.
Big mistake.
Maybe my kid was just born with the bladder of a camel, but he always soaked the GroBabies. So much so that I think we were only able to re-use the outer shell like every other week.
Lesson learned.
The next non-BG diaper got was a Happy Heini’s one, because it had a supercute cow pattern on it. It’s still going strong, but it’s the only HH brand that I ever bought.
Then there were the two FuzziBunz diapers. I got them because I heard raves about the snaps(as opposed to the Velcro on the BG’s), but I found the snaps tricky to do up quickly on a wiggly baby and the back never quite went up high enough, always leaving a bit of baby butt crack exposed.
The final diapers we settled on, and were actually quite happy with, were Thirsties shells with either Kissaluvs or Thirsties cloth diaper on the inside. They’re a bit more prone to leakage than the BG’s, but are still pretty absorbent and have grown really well with my quickly growing boy.
Had I known 14 months ago what I know now, I would have bought 20 BumGenius 3.0's, 10 Kissaluv's cloth diapers, 3 Thirsties covers, 40 flannel wipes, 2 wet bags and called it a day. We have something approximating that now and it works well for us.
We cheat and use disposable diapers when we're out and about, and always have disposable wipes around in case of emergency. That said, we're almost exclusively Earth-friendly, carbon-neutral, crunchy, or what-have-you and it's been remarkably painless. And it will save us cash in the long run!
I'd seriously recommend cloth diapering to new parent.
Now onto my search for potty-training dipes!
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