Today is Day 3 of Dirty Diaper Laundry’s 6th Annual Flats and Handwashing Challenge. You can read more about the challenge here.
When we announced that we were expecting our first baby, the questions started coming… Are you going to breastfeed? Cloth or disposable? Car seats, strollers, cribs, yada, yada… I just assumed we would breastfeed, it seemed like the natural thing to do. But I’d never thought about diapers, or anything else for that matter. I hadn’t been around kids much as an adult, and had no idea there were so many options and so much “stuff” for babies. I remember a conversation with my stepmom very early on about diapers… She asked cloth or disposable, and then started telling me about diaper services and other things that seemed very foreign to me. I hadn’t really thought about it prior to that, but I liked the idea of cloth.
After we moved to Springfield I found a local cloth diaper bank called Cover Your Bum. I talked to them, we attended a Diaper University class to learn about cloth, and got set up to borrow diapers for a couple months after Slaton was born while we built our stash. In the meantime, a friend from high school gave me an entire set of FuzziBunz pocket diapers that she was no longer using for her son, another friend gave me a few random diapers she wasn’t using with her daughter, and our families started buying disposables… So when baby finally arrived we were pretty well set and didn’t need the loan program after all. (It is a great program though, and I’m very glad they’re here and that option is available to families who need it.)
2 1/2 months old ❤
As I mentioned, our families had been stockpiling disposables so we ended up starting with those. They were there, and they were easy, so we used them. And it gave us more time to focus on everything else. (After 20 years or so on our own, we had some adjusting to do when the new little guy joined us. 😉 ) When Slaton was about 2 ½ months old, I tried my first cloth diaper and loved it! We didn’t start using cloth consistently though, until he was about 8 months old, we moved, and got a washer and dryer. Prior to that we were living in a one bedroom apartment on the third floor and doing laundry at a laundromat across town. Cloth was doable at the laundromat, but the thought of adding one more bag of laundry to carry up and down those stairs was not very appealing. And the disposables were still there, so…
16 1/2 months old
Slaton is almost 21 months old now. We still go back and forth, sometimes using disposables at night or when we’re out, but I try to use cloth most of the time. His little sister is due in September, and I’d like to use cloth more consistently with her from the beginning. I’ve tried a few different styles, but have liked pockets with flats as inserts best for Slaton. He was a little older and more squirmy when we started using cloth consistently, so pockets were easier. After this week though, I’m really digging flats and covers, and thinking about using them more when baby girl arrives.
~Jen
The Gray Homestead 