Cloth Diapers

In an effort to reduce costs and to be somewhat more environmentally friendly, Hubby and I will be trying to use cloth diapers for the bebe. Today, we went to a diapering clinic to help us understand a bit more about what cloth diapering is all about. I had done a ton of research on cloth diapers, but until we actually held the different ones in our hands, it was hard to conceptualise all the different choices out there.

And there are a lot of different choices! I'm not even going to get into all the differences you can have with diapers, diaper covers, liners, doublers, and inserts. You can read this Cloth Diapering Guide here, and more Diapering 101 info here.

I will tell you that there is a bit of experimentation, and trial and error; that's what I've heard from a lot of people. So that may be a bit of frustration, patience and endurance to go getting it to work. But if I can reuse my diapers, or even have them recycled, biodegrade or reused by someone else, I'm going with this option. Or at least try. I definitely will try not to let the lure of convenience with disposables be my scape goat (by the way, I lot of people also tell me that you need to sometimes experiment with different brands of diapers, and they are notorious for leaking as well).

Will I never use disposables? I'm not naive enough to think that will never happen. But I'm at least willing to give the cloth diapering thing a good college try. Some of my friends have looked at me like I'm crazy when I mention using cloth diapers. Some things I've heard is that "they leak" (so do disposables), or "you'll have to do a lot of washing" (still costs less over time than buying disposable diapers), or "you'll get diaper rash" (you get them more with disposables).

My stance on this is that, like everything else with the baby, you need to figure out how things are going to work, yes it takes time and perseverance, and yes, it's going to be frustrating. However, there are lots of resources online, if you're patient enough to look for them. I've already bookmarked a number of diapering reference sites. And it never hurts to ask people for advice, that is sometimes the best source of information.

Often convenience comes at a heavy price on the environment, and I feel that this compromise isn't good enough for me. So cloth diapers, here I come!