Our Experience with Cloth Diapers

Many of my friends ask me about our experience with cloth diapers. I have general answers and specific answers.

In general:
We LOVE our cloth diapers. Our main reason for choosing cloth was a financial one- you spend WAY less on cloth diapers than with disposables over the course of the baby's diaper-wearing. Click here to read about saving $$ by using cloth diapers. The whole idea of saving the landfills from stinky dispoables is a great big bonus, as well, but mainly, I'm cheap. When you own your own business, you don't have a choice.

Specifically:
Lily has only had diaper rash a handful of times, mainly when she's eaten something that she's allergic to (you have to find out food allergies the HARD way!). Supposedly cloth babies have much less diaper rash than 'sposie babies. I don't mind dealing with washing & folding the diapers every other day. It feels good when I do it- like I'm being a responsible parent. Sounds hokey, but it's true.

The only downsides we've experienced are having to "scoop the poop" and the occasional diaper leaks that develop when I need to strip the diapers (of detergent build-up). Oh, and that the cloth diapers are physically bulkier than 'sposies, so sometimes we have to sacrifice wearing cute pants for stretchy pants. That's not a bad lesson for a girl to learn anyhow.

Brand Specifics:
We tried the Fuzzi Buns and some other locally-made pocket diapers when Lily was too small for the Bum Genius. I'm a fan of the pocket diaper style in general, but we really like the BG 3.0 because they fit virtually any size and we don't have to keep buying bigger and bigger sizes as she grows. They've held up really well for the 14 months we've been using them. At first we were undoing the sizing snaps everytime we washed them and learned that was too much stress on the fabric around the snaps, but Cottonbabies.com replaced all of those so it was no problem. the only other issue we've had is with the velcro tabs losing their "sticky" but I've fixed that by adding another velcro strip over the top of the tabs after putting on the diaper. Brian calls it the "30 cent solution."

So I hope this helps those of you out there trying to decide on cloth vs. disposables. If not, maybe this will help you decide: choose cloth. (-: