What better day than Earth Day to tell you about baby M's cloth
diapers. Happy Earth Day! We've been cloth diapering baby M's hiney
since he was very wee. Before he was born I thought we'd cloth diaper
him from the start, minus the first meconium poos, which I've heard and
darn near impossible to wash out. A few roadblocks and a whole lot of
free disposable diapers from the hospital prevented us from starting
straight away. But by week three when baby M was finally back up to his
birth weight and I was feeling better, I was ready to test the cloth
waters.
B.B.B. (before baby bee) I blogged about our cloth stash.
I
had bought a few of several brands and types of cloth diapers to start
with, not really knowing what we'd like most. We diapered Mr. Bear
several times to get the whole hang of how each of the diaps worked. I
organized the diaps by size, stuck labels on the drawers so everyone
could figure out how to use them and off to the delivery room we went.
Within
the first few weeks of cloth diapering some clear front runners emerged
in the race for the favorite diap. S declared the Hive a "cover free"
zone, so I quickly sold all of our newborn fitteds. This included all
the Kissaluvs and Thirsties. While these were perfectly good diapers,
they all needed covers, thereby adding a second step to the diapering
process. I wasn't bothered by the second step, but what I didn't love is
that because the whole fitted diap gets wet with pee, I'd be actually
holding pee when rinsing the diaper with our sprayer.
That's a weak excuse now since I rinse our inserts and squeeze them out
by hand as part of my wash routine. Eeew, I know. But it lets me go a
full week between laundry loads. I'll tell you all about it sometime
soon.
Our early favorites were BumGenius 4.0, Charlie
Banana's Small, Fuzzibunz XS and Thirsties Duo Dry. Baby M outgrew the
Fuzzibunz XS quickly even though he's a bit of a peanut still. When we
sold those three diaps they still fit, but their inserts were small so
they didn't hold enough to last through a nap. For the remainder of my
maternity leave we used BumGenius 4.0, our two Thirsties Duo Drys,
Charlie Banana's and reluctantly, FuzziBunz one-size.
Now
that M goes off to daycare with BumGenius diapers each day, we've come
up with a system to use various diapers at different times of day.
When
we wake up in the morning I use a BumGenius. They're the most absorbent
of all the diapers we own and baby M drinks a lot after sleeping for 11
or 12 hours. He'll eat and play for an hour and a half and then go down
for an hour and a half nap in his BG's. Then when he wakes, he'll eat
again, I'll change him into a Charlie Banana stuffed with a BG insert,
dress him for the day and whisk him off to daycare. I send him off in a
Charlie Banana because we don't own enough BG to use them exclusively
and I don't want baby M's daycare momma to have to hassle with snaps of
the Charlies. Otherwise, the Charlie Bananas are just as reliable as our
BG's.
Baby M will use one or two diapers while he's at
daycare. When he gets home he'll eat and then because it's unlikely
that he'll poo before bath time, I'll change him into a Grovia. Grovias
have a reusable outer shell with a snap-in insert, but so far we've
found the outer shell isn't reusable after a poo. I've slowly started to
venture into the world of flats during this last change of the day, but
not with any regularity. An hour or so later we'll start the bedtime
routine with a bath after which we lather M's bum with zinc lotion and
slap a disposable on him for the night. We could probably use a cloth
diaper overnight, but we don't ever do anything to mess with his sleep,
so we've never tried.
In addition to cloth diapering we
also use cloth wipes. We started using cloth wipes a few days after we
got home from the hospital. We use them for the obvious purpose, but
also wash baby M's face and hands with them each morning. I have used
them for vinegar washes and baths, and I've heard that soaked in cold
water and fresh from the fridge, they're great for teething.
We
started with a stash of 40. But within a couple weeks we were finding
ourselves running out often, so now we have a stash of about 80, but 60
would be plenty to get us through the week for all the gazillion ways we
use them. We have a stack in the bathroom for bath time, a stack in my
office to catch dribbles and drips from nursing and pumping and the
remainder are in the nursery. We have a square, plastic container that
we'll fill with ~20 wipes and just enough water to get them all nice and
wet. Just water, nothing else. Every three days I change the water in
the wipes. If there are still wet wipes left, I toss them in the laundry
pail and start fresh so that the heebeejeebees don't grow. Sometimes in
the morning I'll need a bit more than water to get everything clean and
will use a spritz of California Baby Diaper Area Spray. Self
explanatory name, no?
When baby M first started going
to daycare I wasn't sure if I should send his nice wipes or not; I
didn't know how many they would need, etc. So I cut up a few receiving
blankets into squares using pinking shears and sent those. In hindsight,
I could have just sent a little stack of our good wipes each day and
have been fine.
The cloth wipes are by far the easiest
eco-baby switch we made. One wipe does the work of two or three
disposables. Plus, it's pretty easy to grab from the same stack of wet
wipes to wash all ends of the baby. Cheese fingers, cheese nose, cheese
toes and all!
Have you tried cloth diapering? What's your favorite brand? Labels: baby, cloth diapers, cloth wipes, diapers, life
