Switching to Reusable: Diapers

When I was younger, I remember hearing the story about how my dad washed my cloth diapers, only to discover that there were little raisins still stuck to them when they came out of the wash. He had forgotten to scrape the poop off. I thought it was hilarious then, but I'm starting to see how he could have made the mistake.

After my second baby came along, I decided to try out cloth diapers. In the beginning I was just working with the basics: three standard plastic covers and twelve large cotton prefolds from Gerber. I remembered my mom using these with my brothers and sisters - but not as diapers. They were originally my diapers, but she opted for the disposables later on, and all the diapers became burp rags. Because these were the only cloth diapers I could recall, these are the ones I bought, pins and all.

Not surprisingly, the cloth diaper scene has changed a lot since I was a girl, and I was rather pleased to find that there was a wide assortment of new and improved diaper covers, not to mention diaper inserts and liners that go along with them. Unfortunately, I didn't discover this until after I was frantically searching the internet at 3 am, trying to see why my baby kept waking up soaked and screaming (I had cloth sticking out the back of the elastic).

After I'd corrected my mistake, I stayed up for a while, browsing and browsing through the massive amounts of information on cloth diapers. I went into this knowing that there were others out there who used cloth diapers, but I figured they were making a huge sacrifice of time and laundry to save a few bucks. I had no idea that there was such a following (largely due to the fact that it's no longer a huge time-consuming laundry-creator).

I was a bit put-off by the pricing at first - one diaper cover with the insert & liner can cost around $25. That isn't a price I'm willing to pay. I figure I'd need about twelve of those, and for all I know I'd have to buy another set when the baby got a bit bigger. I wanted to invest in this, but I didn't want to invest that much!

So I headed to Ebay. I was a bit disappointed in those results since most of them were listings for brand new items that I still considered overpriced. In the end, I decided that my best bet would be to buy a diaper or two at a time from an assortment of places. I found that Craigslist had great prices for diapers, and I also found a lot of great diapers on Etsy. All of these diapers ran at around $8 a piece, and that's a price even a thrifty shopper like me can settle for, especially since a lot of those diapers were new.

However, just for the sake of getting a little old-fashioned - the pin & cover method with the old prefolds wasn't as bad as I thought it would be. All in all, the experience (aside from the three-in-a-row soakings from my mistake the first night) was a good one. The baby didn't even seem to notice that she was in a different type of diaper, and I stayed completely caught up on my laundry. Knowing that I could have been stuck with a poopy baby and no diapers was quite the motivator to keep the wash going.

If you've had experience with cloth diapers yourself, please let me know what it was. I'd love to get some feedback from others out there, and I'm curious which ones everyone has tried!

Disclosure: I received no compensation for this post, and as always, my opinions are purely my own.