Adventures in Cloth Diapering

On Tuesday, we decided to take the Fuzzibunz plunge! As you can see, Eli was a little skeptical...

...but his little tushie looks so stinkin' cute in a cloth diaper!

I wanted to wait until I had done the first wash cycle on these puppies before commenting on "how it's going". Having survived two days of Fuzzibunz-ing and a load of diaper laundry, I am happy to report that it's going very well! It's easy peasy - absolutely no different than using disposables (except for the part where we no longer have no spend our hard-earned dollaz on diapers that get pooped in and thrown in the trash!). The only added step is the washing and re-stuffing (I stuff the inserts back into the diapers when they come out of the wash so they're ready to be used again), but since I'm home and perfectly capable of doing an extra load of laundry every two days, it's no trouble at all. Putting them on is simple - you're just using snaps instead of tape. The changing part is equally simple - unsnap & remove dirty diaper, wipe dirty baby butt, pull insert out of diaper (it's very easily accessible), drop insert and diaper into wetbag, zip wetbag, put on a new diaper. I don't even have to do any dumping of poop into the toilet or spraying of the diaper yet (more to come on that)! And if you're worried about odors from storing dirty diapers for a day or two, the wetbag I'm using keeps all odors contained - I've only smelled anything for the brief moments that it's open for me to drop another diaper in.

Now, with respect to dealing with the doo-doo... being a two-and-a-half-month-old breastfed baby, his poops are mostly liquid. However, there is plenty of sticky poop residue that doesn't soak through into the insert and remains glopped in the diaper itself, so I thought that I would have to spray that off before dumping them all in the wash. Fortunately, I was wrong :-) After speaking to another cloth-diapering-mama-of-an-infant friend of mine who doesn't do any spraying, I decided to give it a whirl. The online care instructions tell you to run a cold rise cycle first, followed by a hot cycle with detergent followed by a final cold rinse. Curious, I pulled out a few diapers and inserts to check them out after the first cold rinse. EVERYTHING was gone. You would never have known there was sticky yellow baby poo all over them - everything was already white and clean, and that was BEFORE any detergent was added! I was pretty amazed. Of course I proceeded with the detergent wash cycle, and everything came out pristine white, odor-free and ready to be re-worn!

So far I've only had one leakage issue, and it's just a little moisture around the edge of the diaper around one leg. I'll have to play with the sizing settings and see if I can't remedy that - both the elastic around the legs and the snaps are adjustable so that I can play with each until the fit is perfect. But I haven't had any poop-up-the-back issues so far, despite some SERIOUS rumbling on several occasions. I think it helps that the cloth diapers have elastic around the back of the waist (versus disposables which do not), so they're more likely to hold poop in the diaper as it heads up the back! Also related to fit I was lucky in that, after checking out the recommended size settings for his weight and trying them on him, he happens to fit into the adjustments that the diaper comes with straight out of the package. I didn't have to go through all 16 diapers and adjust each leg elastic and the waist elastic, I just checked each to make sure that they were already adjusted to the correct settings, and they were. That would've been one more task to complete before I could get started, and as he grows I'll have to periodically go through them all and adjust the 3 elastics to fit him appropriately. They're very easy to work with, though - the elastics are tucked just under the inner fleece lining of the diaper, and are adjusted by passing a fixed button through a slit in the elastic (there are several numbered slits in each elastic strip so that you can adjust each leg to the same size without having to count it out every time, and the same goes for the waist elastic).

So, that's my review on cloth diapering... so far, so good! We're finding that it's really no different than using disposables (save for the laundering, and since that's no big deal to me it's well worth the savings!)... Ben doesn't even mind them ;-)

Up next will be more home improvement projects, I think. I'm currently laundering our new bedding, and we're working on window coverings for the living room and plan on doing some more painting over the MLK 4-day weekend (that Friday is hubby's regular day off). Stay tuned!