My journey into cloth diapering was a bit different from Beth’s. With our first daughter, my husband and I strictly used disposables. At the time, the thought of cloth terrified us. We were on a really tight budget, and buying diapers every week definitely hurt the bank account, but we preferred the convenience of it. We also lived in a town where the idea of using cloth diapers was very antiquated and not something anyone would really choose to do. So every week for almost 3 years, we bought diapers. Don’t ask me how much we ended up spending on disposing our daughter’s poop, because I really don’t want to know.
When I was pregnant with our second daughter, my husband and I struggled when friends and family would ask what to give as baby gifts. We had plenty of clothes from our first daughter, and we had all of the big necessities already. Then we thought about diapers. At first, we were just going to ask them to buy us disposable diapers if they wanted to give us a gift, and then we had the idea to research cloth.
The only cloth diapers we had any experience with were the prefolds with a cover, like my sister used, but my husband said that if he was going to have to change a cloth diaper, it would have to be simpler than those. In doing our research and asking around, we found Bum Genius 4.0s. They are a one size fits all diaper with pocket inserts. This diaper goes on like a normal disposable, just with snaps.
After receiving the diapers from our family, the only things that we needed to spend money on were a diaper pail, liner, a package of wipes, and a wet bag. All of these cost us about $100. The great thing about cloth diapers is that each time you use them you are getting a better return on investment. You get an even greater ROI when you use the diapers with multiple children. This link breaks down the math of how much you can save when you use cloth. When you use disposables you end up spending thousands more than with cloth. That is really expensive poop!
The only disposable items we use for our cloth diapers are inserts that you can flush when your baby has a dirty diaper. There are other options to do deal with messiness. I hear great things about diaper sprayers and we often say “Man, I wish we would have bought the sprayer.”
Overall, using cloth has been far less scary and gross than I anticipated. Poop is poop, and changing it isn’t glamorous anyway you do it. Just choose to diaper whichever way works best for you and your family. As moms, we all anxiously wait for the day when our last baby is completely potty trained.