Our little guy is now 10 months old, and we are still going strong with the cloth diapers over here! I know the thought of committing to cloth diapering can be overwhelming to some new parents, so I wanted to post an update to reassure those considering it that the process is way easier than you would think!
Over the past 10 months, I have come up with some useful tips that new parents might find helpful. If you missed my earlier post on using gDiapers, you can find that here, and my post about what I keep in my diaper bag here.
Here are the tips I have learned over the past ten months:
- Instead of trying so hard to make sure you get out each and every poop stain, just use the clothesline out in the sun to dry the diapers whenever possible. No pre-treatment, extra soaking, stain removers and stress needed. Let the sun do the work for you!
- Since we live near the ocean, there are plenty of days where the humidity level outside is a bit too high to dry the diapers on the clothesline. On those days I just use the dryer on low, and I’ve tried not to stress myself out about the diapers looking “perfect”. Early on, I spent way too many hours trying to pretreat poop stains and driving myself crazy. Don’t do it.
- Now that our baby is a bit bigger and definitely consumes more fluids than when he was a newborn, I have found that doubling up the cloth inserts in the outer shell works best for us. It provides enough to absorb without being too bulky.
- Likewise, at night we needed some heavy duty action. We have found that doubling up the biodegradable inserts works best for us at night. Yes, I know this will make many cloth diapering purists angry at me again, but I don’t care. I got some angry hate mail after my last post from crazed cloth diapering extremists who were angry that I was promoting the biodegradable inserts. If you can do 100% cloth 100% of the time, good for you. I can’t…I know that I can’t and I own it. We love gDiapers because they are a HYBRID system. If we had to do 100% cloth diapers all the time, we would not stick with it. We lead very hectic lives and the convenience of the hybrid system is what works for us.
- When I am out of the house all day, I hate lugging around poopy cloth inserts. The biodegradable inserts are a lifesaver for me whenever we are outside of the house.
- As much as the purists hate the concept of the non-cloth inserts, I have found an amazing benefit to them. The inserts with just pee on them are compostable. I have to tell you all, my compost has never been better! It is rich, dark, and absolutely the best compost I have ever made in my life. I have been composting since I was a kid, and I am actually going to be a little sad once we no longer have a baby in diapers to help enrich our compost!
- Aren’t you going to do laundry anyway? I usually wash our diapers with our sheets and towels, every other day. I would be washing the sheets and towels on pretty much the same schedule anyway, so it’s really not any extra work!
- We very rarely have any trouble with diaper rash thanks to using cloth diapers.
- The gDiapers sizes last for a really long time, which is awesome! We have been using the size medium for what feels like forever, which is definitely appreciated…less stuff to buy!
- Plus, there’s always the added bonus that cloth diapers are way more adorable in photos than traditional disposable diapers. ;) If you want to see more adorable photos of our little guy in his gDiapers, there are tons of them over on my photography website http://www.apluscphotography.com.
Hopefully this will help inspire some new parents to give cloth diapering a try!
