With my oldest son, Wesley, we never considered cloth diapering. Never even crossed my mind. Cloth diapers (CD), in my mind, consisted of those cheap Gerber prefolds you could buy at Walmart... pinned, leaky pieces of cloth that could be compared to throwing a feed sack on your baby's bum and hoping for the best. But several friends that I met through an online forum use cloth diapers... and through their experiences I slowly learned about modern cloth diapering.... it's NOT just for hippies. ;)
In my subconscience while my oldest son was a baby I must have known that using disposables wasn't for me, as I kept count of every pack of diapers we used. In the first two years of his life, not counting the diapers used in the hospital, we used 5,989 diapers. SIX THOUSAND DIAPERS!!! Six thousand pieces of chemical-filled poo catchers that never disintegrate! But I digress...
In the time we were trying for baby #2 I start doing research about cloth diapering. The two pink lines on my pregnancy test hadn't even started to fade when I started thinking about cloth diapering a baby. Cloth diapering MY BABY. Wowza, might as well start wearing tie dye and Birkenstocks while I'm at it. What quickly became a fleeting thought soon turned into full-blown research. I spent hours and hours reading cloth diapering websites and blogs, asking my online friends questions, looking at public Flickr albums, and watching YouTube videos.
Obstacle #1: Information Overload = Overwhelmed
Google "cloth diapers" and you will get 9, 230,000 search results - give or take a couple hundred thousand. Holy mother - that is a LOT of information about poo catchers. Thankfully I been educated on the basic types of cloth diapers by my friends: All In Ones & All In Twos, Pockets, Fitteds, Prefolds/Covers.... BUT add to that organic, contour, newborn, trainer, wool, whos-your-momma. Geez. And then add to THAT the different closure types. For the longest time I thought there were three closure types: aplix, hook & loop, and snaps. Well if you're a CD newbie like me, I'll save you a lot of time and tell you this: aplix and hook & loop are the same thing, and they both mean VELCRO. So there are two main closure types: velcro and snaps. Add in pins and snappis (a fancy rubberband to hold your baby's diaper on) and I guess that's four.
So I went to my friends: "Just tell me what kind of diaper I need and I'll buy a whole stash." As they most likely chuckled behind their keyboards, they all replied with something along the lines of "you will have to learn what you like" and "it depends on your baby's build" and "just buy a variety and see what happens." Ummm, excuse me? I did get a lot of great suggestions on brands. So I started brand research... BumGenius, Happy Heiny, Tots Bots, Grovia, Thirsties, Knickernappies... (sing it with me now). Information overload.
The first diaper I ever ordered online was a BumGenius (BG) All In One (AIO). I read consistently good reviews about BGs, so with check card in hand I giddily went to their website and ordered my first cloth diaper. While I was on the site I did some more unofficial research and one of the things I came across was a diaper sprayer, which bring me to...
Obstacle #2: Cloth diapers = Poop
Poop. Poop that I have to do something with. Oh. My. Gravy. In all of the time I had been researching cloth diapering, I had been daydreaming of my tiny newborn in a squishy cloth diaper all bundled in my arms... and apparently in my dreams the diaper cleaned itself. So again, I went to my friends online: "Ummm, how do you CLEAN your diapers?" The responses that came included words like: dunk, swish, spray, plop... are you joking me?
And then I started looking into wash routines... which, by the way, is as controversial as the theory of evolution. Wash in hot vs. wash in cold... this detergent vs. that detergent... extra rinses, extra additives, hard water, soft water. Yikes. Thankfully, a friend told me "They're just diapers - it's hard to ruin them" and I suddenly felt a little more at ease with washing my CLOTH diapers, not my EGG-SHELL diapers. And it turns out diaper laundry isn't as scary as I'd thought... more about that later. :)
I continued to collect diapers... just as I had been advised, I bought 2 or 3 of each kind that appealed to me - in a wide variety of brands and types: BumGenius AIO, Applecheeks, prefolds and Thirsties Duo covers, fitteds, and more.
A friend of mine offered to sell me two of her AIO diapers called Ragababes. Cute name, I thought. I google'd them and found the bright green Ragababe website. I was immediately drawn in by the stars on the diaper tabs and the cute prints. As I read the website, I was more drawn in... with a wince, I clicked on the "Wash & Care" link. I read through the seemingly simple prep process and suggested wash routine. There must be a catch, right? Amazingly enough, no. They didn't require one thousand washes prior to wearing (like many diapers do, to "optimize absorption"), and the suggested wash routine was simple (no four hour soaking, 12 short washes, 14 long washes, hot, cold, lukewarm, hold your tongue just right...) Maybe I *can* do this, I thought.
Here's a look at my newborn stash...
- 3 Grovia NB AIO, 2 Applecheeks with inserts, Nanas Bottoms, 10 RagaBabes, 2 BG AIO, 5 BG smalls, 8 BG XS.
Each time I brought in a package from the mailbox or the UPS guy brought more "fluffy mail" I got more and more look from my hubby. "You seriously want to CLOTH DIAPER?!" he said.
Obstacle #3: My "dear" husband - and all of the other naysayers
He was surprisingly quiet during most of my diaper stash hoarding... I mean... building. One night, as I neatly organized freshly washed diapers over an ever-growing belly, I asked him if he was on-board with cloth diapering (umm, kind of late at that point!) He gave me THAT look and said "well, we'll see how it goes, I guess" with that it will never work out sigh at the end. And if there was never a good reason for me to be determined to make CDing work - that was it! :)
Even my own mother, who would pretty much support me in anything I wanted to do (after giving me a lecture of course), was like "seriously, CLOTH DIAPERS? Don't you have enough to worry about?"
But I was determined. I spent money on these diapers, and I would make them work somehow, some way. And make them work, I did!
