Cloth Diapering, Again

It's been a year since we started cloth diapering Sam; he was six weeks old.  And I was terrified.

We made the decision to cloth diaper Luke before he was even home from the hospital, maybe even before he was born.  I excitedly ordered 12 cloth diapers for $300 the day we brought him home.  I was scared to start cloth diapering but once we got into a routine with it I really did like them.  As much as anyone likes diapering. 

I packed up Luke's cloth diapers over two years before we got Sam, a little sad about it.  For almost Luke's whole life to that point we had been washing diapers about every 36 hours.  I thought about diapers probably more than disposable diaper parents because we always had to make sure we had some clean and switched the laundry loads.  It was a marker of how fast time passes when we packed those away.

Regardless, when Sam was six weeks old and big enough to fit in cloth, I was scared to start.  It had been over two years!  Was I going to remember how to do this?  Remember to switch laundry loads?  Spray out the gross ones?  Have diapers drying in the house very regularly?  Would he leak?  How was this going to work???

It was like I hadn't spent 2+ years already dealing with, surviving, and even learning to like all these problems.

So we started.  And it didn't take long for things to not go well.

We had a lot of leakage problems.  It was a frequent occurrence.  

Then within six months of starting almost all of our original diapers were in shreds.  I was DEVASTATED when the first one came out of the laundry like that.  They had cost $25 each and even though we had recouped our costs just using them with Luke, we had counted on being able to use them with subsequent kids!  I didn't want to buy all new diapers, I didn't know what the heck had happened to these, and I liked them!  And what do we do with cloth diapers that no longer function?  Throwing them away didn't seem right!

Luckily, my sister had a large stash, had stopped cloth diapering her own kids, and sold me 11 for a good price.  They were the same brand we had bought originally but a different style.  We had also been gifted two new cloth diapers when Sam was born and had one diaper that Luke had used.  Bringing our stash to 14.  I went through a slightly reduced level of fear of starting new diapers but it all worked out.  Bonus, these new ones dry faster!

And that's where we've been for about seven months now.  Leaking hasn't been a problem for months. We are still using cloth diapers 80% of the time.  Disposables for overnight at home, for sitters, and any time we are away from home overnight (i.e. vacations, lake trips).  We've sprayed out so many that the lever to flip to the handheld sprayer in our shower (which is close enough to the toilet to use as our diaper sprayer) just broke last week, but is still usable.

It feels like cloth diapering should have been easier the second time around.  It was not.  Or maybe we just expected to snap back into a routine when it still took some adjusting, some figuring things out.  But I am glad we are cloth diapering again.

A big reason we did the cloth diapers in the beginning was the cost savings.  We knew we'd be buying formula and figured we could make up some of that cost by using cloth diapers.  And I still do like saving money but I think the bigger issue for me now is keeping stuff out of the landfills.  We've switched to many reusable products like cloth napkins, reusable shopping bags, and I always wash plastic silverware to use again (even though I don't buy any, we still, somehow, end up with a lot).  Cloth diapers fit right in with those.  It feels like we throw so much away and I'm always looking at ways to reduce that. 

We spent $427 on diapers in Luke's first year.  Over 75% of that was our initial cloth diapers.

We spent $145 on diapers in Sam's first year.  50% was our second stash of cloth diapers.

Will these diapers last for a next kid?  I'm not counting on it this time but it sure would be nice if they did!  Either way, cloth diapering, for over three years total, for two kids, has saved us a lot of money and saved the Earth a lot of trash.  I am glad the me of six years ago decided to try them.
  

Other Cloth Diapering Posts:
A Big Cloth Diapering Post (June 2013)
Real Expenses: One Year of Formula & Diapering (April 2014)
Cloth Diapering - Two Years In (May 2015)
So Long, Farewell...Cloth Diapers (February 2016)