In my family, there is a history of cloth diapering. My mom cloth diapered me, and she did part-time cloth diapering with my middle sister. The youngest sister was exclusively diapered in disposables, and it was because my mom didn’t have the time to commit to cloth diapering.

It annoys me when people choose to give us negative feedback when we say we’re cloth diapering. Different things work for different people–cloth diapering is VERY popular in Austin, and it’s irritating when people tell us we will fail at it. We like to “go green” when we can, and this is an easy way for us to do it. My husband fully supported it, and so did the grandparents (which helps, since they may use the diaper at some point).

We’ve decided to commit to cloth diapering, and took a different approach than most people. Here is our plan:

• We registered for several different types of diapers and shockingly, people purchased them (we live in Austin, cloth diapering is popular). We received 1 Bumimis Wrap, 4 Thirsties Duo-Wraps (and 12 inserts), 1 Oh! Katy, 1 GroVia All-in-One, 2 BumGenius, 1 Fuzzibuns,. I ordered 2 Alva Baby, and 1 Blueberry before M was born.
• We decided to start with these and supplemented with disposables, until we figure out which ones we like best and then order more diapers in bulk. We planned on waiting until M was close to 10lbs before using cloth.
• We’ve been cloth diapering for a few weeks now and love it! We’re definitely going to stick with it for now. It was time to place our next order: I ordered 3 Alva Baby, 2 Blueberry (both aplix), 3 Rumparooz (2 aplix, 1 snaps). Next month I will order 2-3 Bum Genuis, and maybe 1-2 more Blueberry or Rumparooz. I really like Rumparooz because they have double gussets, but they are a little bulky right now on my tiny baby.
• My husband really likes cloth diapering, but he has a much easier time with the aplix (velcro) diapers. I ordered a few more of these, since he prefers them and I think they are easier to use when we are out and about. Some people say they don’t last as long, but oh well.
• I’ve purchased some girlie colors, but most of our diapers are white, cream, green, yellow, or a gender neutral print. We plan on using these for Baby C 2.0 too, so I don’t want to have to buy a lot of new diapers.
• I’m hoping now I will have enough diapers to last us about a day and a half. With our original stash, it barely lasted more than a day. M likes to poo a lot, so I couldn’t reuse the liners with inserts very often, which is why our stash lasted only a day.
• We aren’t using cloth at night, and don’t plan to. We use Huggies Pure and Natural at night. I also keep a stack of Huggies in my diaper bag and car, just in case. I usually only take 1-2 cloth diapers with me when we go out since they take up so much room. I keep 2 small wet bags in my diaper bag.
• On vacations and road trips, we will use disposables. For us, it’s too much of a pain to try to do cloth while traveling.
• When you do this much laundry, your electric bill will go up if you constantly throw everything in the dryer. I installed 3 clothes lines (1 LOOONG one outside, 2 inside our laundry closet). I dry the diaper shells on the lines every time I was them. I’ve been drying the inserts in the dryer because they take awhile to dry and I was constantly running out of diaper. I plan to line dry some of the liners in the coming weeks to cut down on dryer use even further.

So that’s where things stand with cloth diapering as of now. I’ll do a follow-up post in a few months to let you know how things are going.

This one size diaper is a little big on M right now, but isn’t it super cute?