Cloth Diapering 101

When I first set up my baby registry, I registered for gdiapers upon the recommendation of a friend, not knowing the first thing about them or cloth diapering. I was thinking they sounded better than pins and plastic pants! Little did I know that a whole world of cloth diapers was about to reveal itself to me...in all its lovely colors, fabrics, and forms - no pins necessary!

I never even got the chance to use the gdiapers. The reasons why are a whole pandora's box that I will open in another post at another time.

Our cloth diaper journey actually started after two bouts of fungal diaper rash. We purchased 5 pairs of old style BumGenius pocket diapers, 3 green and 2 blue, purchased from craigslist. That was enough for about 8 hours, give or take, and several pees and one massive poop. I had no idea what to do with the poop once it was in the dipe. So I read more about it online and purchased a toilet sprayer, which is considered a nicety in cloth diapering, but I just love the way it blasts off the poop! I then purchased a FuzziBuns pocket diaper, and then 2 BumGenius Organic All in ones (no stuffing pockets, yay!) and some wetbags to store the dirty diapers until laundry time. Fast forward, we've made several purchases on craigslist, KellysCloset, Amazon and Etsy which resulted in a pretty impressive stash of fitted diapers, pocket diapers and covers and soakers in fleece and wool, I also stumbled through several sewing sessions to make flannel and fleece inserts, doublers, and wipes.

So, after the stash was ample and we trouble-shooted the leaks, something amazing happened...and it may seem small to you, but it totally changed our life! This is what happened... we no longer bought disposable diapers from a store- no Huggies, no pampers, no disposable diapers period. Where we had previously made several trips to a big box store to stock up on Huggies to fill up the landfill, now we simply used the cloth diapers, washed them and reused them over and over and over. And, I am not even going to go into how adorable they are on the little guys tooshie. I am also going to save my confessions of cloth diapering addiction for another post. Bottom line (pardon the pun) I absolutely love cloth diapering.