12.15.2010

the one about cloth diapering

I have to give all credit here to Ken. It was his idea that we do cloth diapers for Avery's tushy. I was hesitant, probably because it's different, but I have to say, I love it. Since being a temporary stay at home mom, I have come to enjoy the simple things in life. I enjoy doing laundry, washing bottles, folding baby clothes- it's as if it has a greater purpose than before. So I really don't mind cleaning her diapers. It's real simple, and cleaning a poopy diaper is NOT that big of a deal. To be totally honest, it's good to make sure that what's coming out is all good, so when I'm cleaning a poopy diaper, I get to "analyze" if you will how Avery's processing things. :)

This is what we do:
We use the pre-folds which means we form the diaper to her body. At her age and size, the diaper is about the size of a piece of paper. The center of the diaper is 6-8 layers thick while the sides are about 2 layers thick. Plenty of absorption.
Our station: From L to R we have the shells that go over the diaper, the pre-fold diapers, the liners for the night diaper, flannel wipes and in the basket some diaper cream, baby lotion, etc.
This snappy is what holds the diaper on her. So much better than pins, in my opinion. And not once has this come off while she's been wearing it. It's not Velcro; it's these claws that grab onto the cotton really well and stay in place.
The shells are not only really cute, they go over the diaper and keep all the moisture and other things contained. Someone said they looked like American Apparel diapers. I'm pretty sure these were not nearly as expensive as anything sold at that store! This one is attached by Velcro at the top.
This one is attached with snaps that provide a lot of size adjustment for our growing baby. At night, she sleeps in a much bigger diaper with a liner so that a wet diaper doesn't wake her up. When we do that, we open the snaps more to make more room.
THE GUSSETS! This is an important piece to the type of diapers we use. The little white line closest to the leg is the gusset. This keeps every thing in the shell and not out on the clothes and mom's pants. I have made the mistake of not checking to see if the diaper was in the gussets and ended up with poop on my leg. Fool me once...
The cleaning. I am going to NOT post a picture of a poopy diaper. We all know what it looks like! But when that happens, we take the diaper to the toilet and rinse it off with:
this sprayer that Ken hooked up to the water line of the toilet. It's just like a sprayer you have attached to your kitchen sink. We'll just hold the diaper over the toilet and rinse it off. Then we ring it out and put it in:
our diaper bag. This bag is great and it holds about two days worth of diapers and dirty wipes. You only have to rinse off the poopy diapers, and the wipes we just put in there without rinsing. So every other morning, I take the bag and put the whole thing in the washer. At the bottom of this bag is a zipper that I unzip and in the wash, the diapers escape and get good and clean. You don't have to reach in a pull out the dirty diaps which is nice. We pre-wash and then wash the load on heavy soil level with warm water.
Now is the weather is right, we hang the diapers out to dry. The sun bleaches them and drys them quickly. Ken is a bigger fan of this than I am, but I'm learning to love it. They have a tendency of coming out a little crispy when we hang them to dry, so we'll throw them in the dryer for a few minutes to soften them.
She seems to enjoy them! Way to save the world, Avery!

We also made a video because people don't believe how easy it is to diaper this way. Enjoy!

Watch us cloth diaper!

Websites that we love about cloth diapering:
Green Mountain Diapers
Zuka Baby, New Orleans

1 comment:

Unknown said...

I've been wanting to ask you if you just use water in your spray bottle for your wipes, or if you put anything else in there. I currently just run each flannel wipe under warm water right as I'm about to use it, but Jeremy doesn't like all the steps of that, so I'm looking for a new system for wetting my wipes.

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