Top Ten Tuesday

Ten Reasons To LOVE Cloth Diapering!

(By a Mama convert who found the concept inconceivable with her first two babies)

10. Even though this is the #10 spot, I’ll start with the reason I was drawn to it in the first place: MONEY! You save scads of dollars cloth diapering vs. using disposables. (Check out that chart!) Because we use a combination of prefolds/covers and pocket diapers, plus one disposable diaper a night, I estimate our total cost through potty training to be around $600. Compare that to $2500 for disposables and that equals a whole lotta groceries to feed my three hungry boys!

9. WOW they are cute! (See pics below)

8. Back to the $$$-the resale value is incredible. When the baby is potty-trained, not only do you get to sell off your stash for nearly what you paid for it, but they say that cloth-diapered babies learn to use the potty earlier.

7. They make all-in-one cloth diapers that are just as easy as using disposables. These are particularly Dad-friendly; though my sweet hubby actually prefers old-school pre-fold diapers with a cover.

6. Back to the cha-ching again–NO extra trash! I’d have to pay for another trash can and/or spend gas and money driving to the dump each week to dispose of the extra trash generated by disposables. (The environmental benefits are also great.)

5. It doesn’t have to be all-or-nothing. You can, as we do, still use a disposable at night. I have yet to find a cloth diaper or liner that keeps him feeling dry all night long. And at my age, sleep is a precious commodity, well worth the quarter we spend on that nightly diaper that keeps him from waking up to be changed.

4. You might find yourself bonding with your mom or grandmother. Mine think it’s awesome that we’re using cloth diapers, and love the nostalgia of using them again. (This isn’t always true, though, as my mother-in-law thinks I’m nuts. Of course, I’m pretty sure she felt that way before cloth diapers came into the picture so it’s all good!)

3. 100% cotton is SO good for their skin. Even though my baby Jonah inherited the same fair, rash-prone skin his brother Eli and I have, he hasn’t had any of the horrible diaper rashes poor Eli had by this age.

2. Fluffy bums are adorable! Especially when paired with some BabyLegs (see pic below). And the extra padding adds cushion for falls when they begin walking.

And the number one reason to love cloth diapering….

1. It is easy! Nowhere near as hard as I feared! Confession: I can be a little lazy. If cloth diapering were hard, I wouldn’t do it, no matter what the benefits were. I do a load of diaper laundry every other day, and for some reason, those loads are really fun to fold and put away.

And that leads to the question I am most often asked about using cloth: Don’t they stink?

I’m sure they would stink if they weren’t washed every other day. But a wet cloth diaper generally has no odor at all. Now that I’m using cloth, I think that disposables smell bad when they’re wet. It’s funny that I never really noticed it before, but it’s a funky, concentrated, perfumy urine smell that I never smell when Jonah is in cloth. When he poops, it’s either shaken out into the toilet, or wiped out and flushed, and I sprinkle baking soda on the diaper before dropping it in the pail. You don’t smell the diaper pail at all in the nursery, something that has pleasantly surprised this Yankee-Candle loving mama!

I honestly wish I’d known all of this when my older boys were babies. Oh well, live and learn, eh?

Here are a few pics of my cutie in his stash:

A Thirsties Duo Size 1 cover over a Snappied prefold:

In a Muttaqin Baby diaper with whales!

Adorable Wiggle Worm Bottoms cover with dogs and disco balls:

Monkey diaper pins I found at BabiesRUs last weekend:

(Gotta love how they match the monkey on his shirt!)

And finally, not overly happy in a regular Thirsties diaper cover and green dotted BabyLegs:

(But he’s not unhappy about the diaper–that boy was hungry!!)

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