First, some cuteness. He always looks so alert and calm when we snap him in his car seat:
Second, a picture of me and hubs with his birthday cake. I only get to make one cake a year (now two, yay!) so I usually take the time to make something fun. This year it was a Beatles cake, just regular Betty Crocker cookbook carrot cake.
Ok, now on to the point of this post :D We have gradually been starting cloth diapering with Mac. We knew before he was born that we were going to want to cloth diaper to save money and since I stay home with him, I can cloth diaper without too much hassle. Also cloth diapers are a lot more advanced than they used to be, so they aren't as much work as they were in the old days. We also knew that we weren't going to start out cloth diapering to give us time to adjust to being parents and research out the cloth diaper system that would be the right fit for us. We like the idea of being able to buy diapers now and use them with all of our children - way more economical and less wasteful than using exclusively disposables.
Now I'm really spoiled because the online cloth diaper retailer Diaper Junction has their only store location here in Virginia Beach so I was able to go to the store and see and touch the different diapers in making my decisions. Also, I don't have to pay for shipping. The other nice thing is that right now, Swagbucks offers Diaper Junction $5 gift cards for only 299 Swagbucks. I'm able to get those and save $5 on each of my orders.
This is the bucket that I got to put the soiled diapers in until washday. It's just a Safety 1st Easy Saver diaper pail and I got it because several people wrote on the reviews that they use it for cloth diapers. I got a Planet Wise wet bag to put in it to hold the diapers. On washday, I throw the wet bag and all the diapers straight into the wash together. I got the diaper pail from Babies R Us using a 20% off coupon and a gift card. It usually retails for $20 which isn't bad at all compared to other diaper pails. The wet bag was $16.50 from Diaper Junction and I used one of my gift cards for that too.
Like I said, we've been starting out slow with cloth diapering. Right now I just have one Flip diaper cover and this Best Bottom diaper cover. The Flip was on Mac when I took this picture. I have enough diapers here to last more than one day so if I'm doing much cloth diapering, I'll have to wash them every day but I wanted to do some test runs before I bought too many more. I used my friend Hope's excellent diaper review post here which helped a lot with making some of my diaper buying decisions. I've been stuffing the Flip with these generic tri-fold diapers from Babies R Us and I got three size small inserts for the Best Bottom to use for my trials.
I like that you can use any inserts with the Flip and you don't have to buy their specific inserts or multiple sizes. You could stuff these with kitchen towels in an emergency - it doesn't really matter. The problem with this for me is that it's a little too much like old school cloth diapering and not quite as convenient since you have to fold and stuff. Also, Mac had a blow out in the Flip today and it seemed like it didn't do too much to protect him but I'm not going to pass judgment until I'm sure that it wasn't because I didn't have it snapped tight enough or that his legs are still too thin for the leg openings.
Here is the Best Bottom with one of the inserts snapped in. I really like that these snap in and don't involve any folding so that makes them more convenient to use. I will have to buy different sizes of inserts as Mac grows, but again, since I'm investing in all of our children here, that doesn't bother me too much. Depending on the inserts you get, they're about $4 each. The different size inserts also keeps it from being so bulky on the little guy. When I change him, I'll just pull the insert off, wipe out the cover, and following Hope's advice, let the cover air dry and I'll put the Flip on him for the next go round. That way I rotate the covers and let them air out between uses.
There are lots of other kinds of cloth diapers and it's pretty overwhelming to wade through them all and decide what's right for you. I decided that I wanted to go with these All-in-Twos so that I could wash the inserts and reuse the covers; and I wanted these brands that use the same cover as the baby grows and I don't have to buy several sizes of covers.
Right now I'm really liking the Best Bottom and foresee myself buying more of those and making them my primary diaper. We're still getting the hang of it and we use disposables at night still, because I haven't invested in any overnight inserts (which are thicker) and because David primarily changes him at night. Sometimes.
Lastly, for disposable diapering, I highly recommend this little diaper caddy:
When I went to set up the baby registry, my friend Rachel recommended I register for one and I'm so glad I did. Until I started cloth diapering, we pretty much never changed Mac at his changing table - we just carried this caddy around the house, plopped it down wherever we were, and changed Mac right there. We still have it in our room at night for night changes. It's so convenient to have everything so handy.
So far, cloth diapering has been quite manageable as we ease into it. As I learn more and get more diapers, I'll be sharing more about what I learn.
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