We’ve got a baby on the way (due in September), and we’ve decided to give cloth diapers a try. Anyone here have any experience? Favorite brands? Tips and tricks? Any advice/suggestions at all would be much appreciated.
They’re good for cleaning plexiglass with a good plexiglass cleaner. Just the thing for my motorcycle helmet visor. Ray-Bans, too.
ETA: Sorry. That’s the only use I have for diapers of any kind.
They’re good for about 9 months to a year but beyond that they’re not great at managing the effluence of an active toddler. ISTR that they’re better for keeping down diaper rash as well. And your kid WILL get diaper rash no matter what you do, so don’t go feeling like a failure when it strikes. Instead, get a can of Bag Balm from your local pharmacy.
Our kid started peeing through every brand of pocket and AIO diaper we bought at five weeks old. We switched to disposables and she immediately started sleeping through the night. Cloth may work great for you but it did not for us.
I cloth diapered my second kid from 6 weeks through potty training.
The first thing to know is that today’s cloth diapering is not your grandmother’s diapering. Don’t think of wet, droopy bottoms, with pins and rubber pants. Instead think of space-age materials, bold exciting patterns and lots and lots of choices.
There are a lot of different ways to cloth diaper. You can get a diaper service, where they drop off your clean diapers and pick up the dirty ones. You don’t purchase the diapers, but do have to pay a monthly fee, the price probably varies locally.
You can buy your diapers and launder them yourself - this is what I did. The outlay here can be as much as $200, plus the cost of water, electricity and cleaners. The upside here is that you have control over what diapers you use and what chemicals are used to clean the diapers, with a service you can’t.
You even can use gDiapers which is sort of half-way between cloth and dispoable.
If you decide to buy your own diapers and launder at home you have even more choices to make. You can do a prefold and wrap, you can do an all-in-one, you can do pocket diapers. Each of these are a way to get something asorbant next to your kid’s butt and something waterproof on the outside.
When the boy was little I used Chinese prefolds and ProWraps or Bummis. When he was older we switched to Fuzzi Bunz and Happy Heinis, with hemp and microfiber inserts.
My son rarely had diaper rash, and if he did I just switched up the laundering style a bit. I liked knowing what was against his skin, the little gel pebbles that Huggies leaves behind is gross even if not harmful.
He never had blowouts and the cloth held in everything just fine, even big 2-year-old poop. He couldnt get out of his diaper either, because of the snaps, and so I never had the streaker problem.
Some people can’t get past the idea of having to shake solid waste out into the toilet…but it is a rearely known fact that technically you are supposed to do the same with disposable diapers.
If you want to research it further I recommend checking out diaperpin.com, it is a great resource. Or try some of the parenting forums online, most places have a cloth diapering forum where people would be happy to give you advice.
I was going to start this thread as well. Anyone have any experience with the aforementioned gDiapers? We were considering giving that a try.
As for cloth, the cleanup is really just shake the big chunks into the toilet and throw the rest in the washer? Where does it go betwixt shake out and washer? Can you just use a diaper genie?
(We’re expecting as well and I’ve never been around babies in my life! Terrified.)
Maybe if you are truly uncertain you should start out with a diaper service. Believe it or not, those new service diapers smell wonderful.
My now-22 year old was in disposables because I worked full-time and the daycare provider didn’t want cloth.
When my now-18 year old was born, I quit regular work to do home daycare and thus went the cloth route. We used a service until I was certain I was staying home past maternity leave, then switched to doing it at home. To me it was no big deal at all. I think as far as storage of dirty diapers until wash day, I believe I just used some sort of a sealable hamper lined with a heavy-duty plastic bag.
Now, our laundry room was in the basement, away from the main living area, so the smell might be a concern. The ammonia smell was fairly strong.
If you live in an area where water and sewer costs are high, it might get a little expensive, but that’s obviously something you could evaluate at the time. Also, I just loved the extra face time with my little guy. It was a good time to coo and sweet talk.
I used almost exclusively cloth diapers for both children, except when we were traveling. As has been said, just rinse in the toilet, then plop into a lidded diaper pail. I washed them (the diapers, not the children) in hot water, with bleach, and with soap flakes instead of detergent. In good weather I hung diapers on the clothesline to dry. I figure I saved a boatload of money. My kids never got diaper rash. Leakage was actually less of a problem than with the disposables. Spare clean ones are great shoulder covers when burping an infant. When you don’t need them any more for the original purpose they are perfect dustcloths.
I did cloth with my first until she was a year - she started daycare then and they wouldn’t deal with cloth. I used mostly chinese prefolds, but then I discovered fitted diapers (country comfort were my diapers of choice, but they seem to have disappeared now - only 7 years later!)
For the most part, I found cloth took some extra effort, particularly when out and about, but nothing I couldn’t handle. I washed them myself and usually hung them to dry.
I had to buy everything in larger sizes, though, to get over her bulky little tush. Disposables definitely make for a svelter baby, if you’re into that kind of thing
Then I had girly number 2. She was a skinny little chicken (my first girly was a squishy, round baby), and leaked through every diaper set up that I had, so I went to the dark side and used disposables for her.
I still use all the chinese prefolds for housework, though.
We use BumGenius 3.0s with our 3 month old and LOVE them. She’s a heavy wetter (ha!) and we’ve only had one leak incident – it was time to switch to the heavier liner that day. The thick liner holds 15oz of liquid… which is a heck of a lot! Leaks seem to happen when there’s a laundering problem (like a detergent buildup, which you can fix) or a fitting problem, which you can learn to fix by trial and error…
Our kidlet seems to have very sensitive skin. Two days in disposables while we were on a road trip made her immediately start to break out in a rash. I was soooo happy to put her back into cloth…
Bum Genius also now makes AIOs, but some people seem to have more trouble with those than with the good old pocket style (like the 3.0s). For smaller newborns, their bamboo AIOs are apparently the bomb. Eleanor was a 7lb13oz baby and we started her off in BGs with newborn liners from the very beginning. Never had leak, blowout, or such problems at all, even during the early “tiny baby” phase (except that one time when I realized that hey, it was truly time to move up in the world, liner-wise)
Hope this helps! Feel free to poke me, if you have any questions n’ stuff…
I was given a year of diaper service as a gift at my baby shower - not knowing nuthin’ from nuthin’ about babies or diapers, that’s what we did. And I wanted to do the “environmentally correct” thing, though there’s some debate about that. They gave me a tall lidded white pail and brought a stack of cloth diapers every few days. I was instructed to “shake the solid matter” into the toilet, put the soiled diapers in the pail and set it outside the door for pickup every few days. It worked out very well. After a couple months, even Mr. Salinqmind got the hang of it! I was a stay at home mom so I didn’t mind fiddling with pins and plastic pants. The second year I still used cloth some of the time but used disposables more and more often. My daughter had diaper rash with both cloth and disposables, but I’m afraid that that’s a side effect of peeing in your pants, no matter how attentive a parent is at changing the diapers!..Funny, I just saw Mike Rowe slaving away at the diaper service laundry on Dirty Jobs not that long ago, and I was frankly surprised diaper services still existed!
Oh, one more thing - I collected a lot of diaper pins along the way, and I have to say that over the years, I don’t think a week has gone by that I haven’t used a diaper pin as tool for any number of fussy little jobs.
.
I cloth diapered my second until just recently - he’s 3 and he’s outgrown his diapers. He’s sort of half potty-trained and I don’t want to invest in more, so he’s wearing disposables.
I used all-in-ones (some BumGenius, but my favorites are Bumwares). I also used fitted diapers with handknit wool covers, which are referred to as soakers, shorties or longies. I did all the washing myself. For poop, I did the toilet shake and dry diaper pail, as others have described above. We also installed a little spray thing on our toilet (you can see one on the BumGenius website I linked to) for the larger messes.
I loved, loved, loved the cloth diapers. They’re so soft and nice - you feel good putting them on your baby. Plus, they’re really cute. Look at these!
A good resource for learning about the different options that are available is Green Mountain Diapers. Check out their FAQs.
I love my diaper service. Cloth diapers in washable covers with Velcro tabs are convenient and really quite nice.
One consideration is that I don’t keep the hot water very hot to avoid scalding. I would want it near boiling to wash diapers, and that is just not safe.
We used cloth nappies on our first child (from about six months, she was premature and too small for them to fit her properly at first) and are about to start using them again in about six weeks when my son comes along… My wife has recently started a cloth nappy production business, as the market is just starting to take off here in South Africa. Her websitehas some really good resources detailing the different styles etc (although obviously tailored to the SA market).
Grim
We’re using BumGenius 3.0 too, our son is 10 months old now. They’re pretty easy to handle, a sprayer really helps get rid of the solids before dumping them into the pail.
The one thing that we noticed is the sensitivity of the diaper to the washing process. A couple of times we had diapers get too much soap, and it caused immediate leaking problems. Once we followed the stripping and washing process exactly, leaks are very unusual.
They do seem to be much bigger than disposable diapers, which encouraged us to buy garment extenders which really work nicely.
HA! Thank you for that! I’ll be gettin’ some of those for 'nor. 
I didn’t know those things existed. Rock on.
So, they just go into a dry pail until they’re washed? Is there a certain, well, lingering odor? Would one of those diaper genie things keep everything self contained until wash day?
Also, the brands I’m seeing here seem to be leaning toward velcro tabs, it appears. Do those wear out after the numerous washings?
I really WANT to do cloth, but there has to be some reason that they’re not more popular, right?
We use this cheapo diaper pail, with deodorizer inserts in the lid, and have very little odor problem. You don’t let the diapers sit around too long, they get washed every day or every other day, the stink doesn’t have a chance to develop. Now, that was mostly fall and winter for me, maybe it’ll change in the heat of summer.
After 10 months of use, the velcro tabs are beginning to show signs of wear. Apparently you can get free replacement tabs, but you have to sew them on yourself.
You can also get diapers with snaps instead of velcro, if that’s what you prefer.
What a Diaper Genie does is wrap each (disposable) diaper in a plastic bag. Basically, when it’s full, you have a really long garbage bag with each diaper twisted up…here’s a picture, since it’s hard to describe (I don’t know that guy…random internet picture). So, you definitely don’t need a Diaper Genie for cloth diapers. You’d have to unwrap them all for washing. You just need a diaper pail with a lid. I actually used a washable, nylon bag that hung in our laundry room. Every night, I’d just turn the whole thing inside-out into the washing machine and toss the bag in there, too.
I’ve always assumed that 1) people don’t know they’re better now than when your grandma used them, 2) there’s an initial outlay, and 3) people have a gut feeling that it’s grosser than disposable.
I told my boyfriend my mom used cloth diapers on me because the disposable ones all leaked because I had such skinny legs (I’m sure they’re better now) and he said “Oh GOD! Stop touching me! Get your leg off me! That’s disgusting!” I mean, it’s been almost 30 years.