Tuesday, October 7, 2008

Cloth Diapers - They aren't your mamas cloth diapers!!

In our attempts to be green, Dennis and I have decided to go with cloth diapering for Baby Swender(s). No, we are not having twins; the plural refers to subsequent babies that are likely to follow at some point.

There are A LOT of cloth diaper options out there these days. In fact, when I started looking into it, I was quite overwhelmed. Fortunately, we have a local cloth diaper company, Toasty Baby (www.toastybaby.com), that does in home demos. We had the chance to talk to them a couple times to get our mind around the different options and have now decided to go with BumGenius (www.bumgenius.com). It's bascally as easy as a disposable as far as changing goes. It's a pocket diaper that comes with cloth inserts. You just put the inserts in when they come out of the wash, and you're ready to go! It's also a one-size. There are little snaps on the front that adjust the height, so they fit baby from birth to potty training!

There's also an ingenious thing called the mini shower. It's exactly what it sounds like and attaches to your toilet. When there are poopy diapers, you just hold it over the toilet, rinse, and throw the diaper in your diaper pail.

Not only is this environmentally friendly, but it is cost effective. We need to buy somewhere around $700 worth of diapers and accessories. However, since we won't have to buy additional sizes, this should be the only diaper expense for all of our children! AND if they're still in good shape when we're done with diapers, apparently cloth diapers have a decent resale value!

Heidi

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hey Guys!
Good news and bad news! We looked into cloth diapers quite a bit (and may still do them) and believe it or not, they're not any more green than the others since it takes soo much water to wash the number of them and so many detergents. I kept hoping that somehow the cloth diapers would be better but everywhere I looked, they didn't seem to be.

On the other hand, I've heard REALLY good things about the BumGenius. A friend of ours from high school has had terrific success w/them- you can check out her blog here. I'm pretty sure she's blogged more than once about cloth diapers but feel free so look around if you're interested. http://katierobinson.wordpress.com/2008/09/30/i-heart-cloth-diapers/

That's all for now. Hope you're well! Baby Swender will be here before you know it!

Dennis & Heidi Swender said...

I've heard that, but I don't buy it. You're supposed to use 1/4 the detergent you normally would. We already buy natural, concentrated stuff, so that means less than a teaspoon of detergent. Plus we have a front loader which uses less water. Plus, water is, on some level, a renewable resource. Also it scares me the things they put in disposables...not stuff I want next to my baby's skin.

Jenney said...

Hi, I'm brand new to your blog...found it through a friend. I want to ENCOURAGE you to use cloth. I started with our second baby and can't believe I used disposables for so long. We still use them once in awhile, but we are 98% cloth. I have tried to do a very small, very informal blog on my journal in cloth diapers in addition to my family blog. www.clothcrazy.blogspot.com
We are in the middle of Financial Peace University and soon we will be DEBT FREE. I think that using cloth really has helped us....plus they are environmentally friendly...plus my kids don't have chemicals on their genitals 24/7.
Good luck!
Jenney

Jenney said...

oops, my journey, not my journal...sorry :o)

Anonymous said...

How does that do with the messy ones? I worked in a daycare, and I know how often disposables leak up their backs. I would think it would happen even more frequently with cloth.