Anders in Cloth Diapers

We've been using cloth diapers on Anders since he was a month or two old, but haven't mentioned them here yet. We knew from the start that we wanted to do something that wouldn't fill up the landfills, but the idea of using washable, reusable cloth diapers was both attractive (to our green side) and off-putting (to our clean side). When he was first born, we had enough new things to worry about, so disposables were the choice for the first month or so. Once he got a little older and we got used to having him around, we finally had time and at least a little energy to do the research and find diapers that would work for him. We didn't have any friends using cloth so we had no veterans to rely on.

There are so many more options out there now than the stereotypical "Chinese pre-fold" that most people think of. Corinne did get a tip on several places online that would send a sampler of a number of different styles and manufacturers so that you can try them all on your baby before buying in quantity. We tried quite a few different styles: cotton, fleece and hemp material, one-size-fits-all versus specific sizes, velcro fasteners versus snaps (no safety pins!), etc. So many options!

A friend did recommend gdiapers which are a nice disposable/cloth compromise. They are adorable cloth covers with disposable yet compostable/flushable inserts. We even found hemp cloth liners to replace the disposable liners. However, we had a lot of leaks with these. My theory is that they work better with girls than boys.

We ended up choosing diapers called Thirsties Fab-Fitted that fit him well and came in all sorts of cool colors.

These are worn with an additional outer cover as a moisture barrier, so you don't actually see the colors once they are on (the covers are white). But that didn't stop us from at least pretending during his photoshoot:

It took us a while to find a cover that fit Anders well. Most had too much material around the waist such that we couldn't get the waist tight enough without pinching off his legs. We found the cloth diaper shop Babyworks in Portland and stopped in for advice. They were very helpful and let us try a bunch of covers on Anders. The cover that fit him well was the Niji. Since it is made in Japan, we like to call it the Ninja cover.

We have almost three days worth of cloth diapers now, which means that we're cleaning them about every other day. It's not nearly as disgusting as it sounds; in fact, we just put the dirty ones directly into an airtight container until laundry time. Then two cycles in the wash (cold with no soap, followed by hot with diaper-friendly soap) gets them completely clean. That might change once he starts on solid food, but for now it's easy.

We've found that we much prefer doing laundry over hauling bags of diapers to the trash. We've even gone to cloth wipes. Other benefits are that the cloth fit much better than the disposables and as a result the blowout rate is much lower.

He still gets a disposable at night, though. Since he's sleeping straight through for about 9 hours each night, none of the cloth diapers seem to hold enough moisture for that period of time. One a day is sure a lot better than nine!

- Mike, Corinne, and Anders Rocket