Kristie McNealy, MD

If you would have told me a year, or even a month ago, that I would start off 2009 as a cloth diapering mommy, I would have laughed at you.  Of all the household chores I can think of, I hate laundry the most, and I just couldn’t stand the thought of adding 3 or 4 more loads of laundry to my to-do list each week.  Even before we started homeschooling, and added several new blogs to our repertoire, I could not even fathom doing cloth.

One of my best friends has been cloth diapering for a while now, so the combination of her advice and the fact that I was absolutely SICK of buying disposables finally pushed me over the edge a couple of weeks ago.  Clearly, I’m not an expert by any means yet, but after a little more than a week of cloth diapering day, night and while out and about, I can definitely tell you it’s easier than I thought.

If you’re thinking about cloth diapering, the first thing you’ll need to decide is what type of diapers you want.  Saving money was a major motivator for me, so I chose to go with prefold diapers and covers.  You can get even lower tech by buying flat diapers, but since I don’t have any one around to teach me all of the crazy folding involved with those, I opted for prefolds instead.  You can also purchase fitted and contoured diapers to go inside your covers, but with greater convenience comes higher cost.  If money is less of an object, you can use pocket diapers, which, as their name implies, have a pocket where you stuff a soaker of your choice, or all in one diapers (AIOs) which are basically as close as you can get to disposables.

If you’re fortunate enough to have a cloth diaper store locally, I definitely recommend going in to check out what’s available, or chatting with cloth diapering friends to find out what works for them.  You can also check out sites like the Diaper Pin and The Diaper Hyena for reviews of different diapering products.  Like anything else though, expect reviews on most products to be mixed.  Just like some disposable diapering moms swear they can only use Pampers, while others hate them, people tend to be just as split over their opinions about different cloth diaper brands.  Keeping this in mind, I simply avoided diapers that had totally negative reviews, and made the best choice I could amongst what was left.

I have two kids in diapers right now, so I picked some one size covers, as well as some that came sized like disposables.  I started out with three different brands: Thirsties, Wonder Wrap and Mommy’s Touch, and found that like disposables, while each had their good and bad points, they are all working fine for my kids.

As for all the other diapering accessories you can buy, the only thing I regret not purchasing is a Snappi to hold my prefolds together.  They stay in place fine under a cover for my little guy, but on my daughter, they seem to slip around too much.  I needed to buy more covers anyway, once I made sure the ones I chose originally would work for us, so I ordered a couple of Snappis when I made that purchase.

As for online diaper shops, so far I’ve ordered from two different ones: Kelly’s Closet and Babee Rockz.  I found that Kelly’s Closet had a wider assortment, which was good when I wanted to try several different brands.  Once I knew what I needed, I was able to get a slightly better deal on those items at Babee Rockz’ end of the year sale.  So far, I’ve had a good experience dealing with both stores, and recommend them.

Over the next month, I’ll be sharing what works for me as far as diaper pails, laundering and night time diapering.  If you have any cloth diapering questions, leave a comment, and I’ll do my best to find an answer.  I imagine this will be an evolving process as my kids grow, but I’m glad to report that I’m really happy with our switch.  My only regret is not doing it sooner!

Similar Posts:

• Advantages of Cloth with Convenience of Disposables
• Healthy Green Parenting on a Budget
• Other Uses for Cloth Diapers
• Healthy Accomplishments in 2009 and Goals for 2010