After much research I decided that I was going to buy a small stash of pocket diapers. These were cheaper than all-in-one diapers (AIOs), and faster drying, but still had the convenience factor of disposables. I did find a few AIOs on clearance (discontinued color) so I bought a few of those too. I also had a large collection of fitted diapers loaned to me by the above-mentioned friend. I was ready to go. The diapers I had were all one-size, meaning that they were supposed to fit from birth to potty training. I'll describe why one-size diapers are a BIG FAT LIE in another post, so stay tuned.
When Noah was born things did not exactly go as planned. My agonizing breast-feeding struggle is fodder for it's own post, but needless to say I had no time to think about laundry. Noah wore disposables. When I started cloth diapering at about 2 weeks old, I quickly realized some of the diapers weren't going to work for Noah (rookie mistake #1: buying too many of one diaper before realizing my needs). Noah still wore some disposables, because otherwise I'd be doing diaper laundry every single day (rookie mistake #2: not buying enough diapers). Eventually we settled into a nice routine of cloth during the day and disposables at night and when out and about (rookie mistake #3: not cloth diapering full-time). Since I wasn't "fully committed" to cloth, I found it a little cumbersome to be doing diaper laundry when I had perfectly good disposables sitting around. I considered quitting often, but I really wanted to recoup my diaper investment by at least buying fewer disposables.
Everything changed when I became pregnant with Lydia. I had a difficult pregnancy with several complications and relied heavily on help from various family members. I had no time or energy to teach them how to use (and wash and stuff) my cloth diapers, and frankly I was worried about them getting ruined, so we took a cloth break for a few months. And suddenly I realized exactly how much money I was throwing in the trash by not using cloth, and that amount was going to double with the birth of our second little one. We began to prepare for two in cloth diapers.
We cloth diapered Lydia starting from the day she came home and Noah went back into cloth as well. We immediately realized, again, that we didn't have enough diapers. I bought some inexpensive prefold diapers to fill the gap. I had avoided this type of diaper previously because they seemed hard to use and old-fashioned, but I soon came to love them. Lydia was plagued by rashes no matter what kind of diaper we used and we soon figured out that she was allergic to the commercial baby wipes we were using. Enter cloth wipes! I can't BELIEVE we didn't use them from the start (rookie mistake #4: thinking cloth wipes would be inferior to disposable). Not only did her rashes disappear, but the cloth wipes cleaned so much better. We also started using our cloth when leaving the house too...and discovered it wasn't as scary as we thought it would be. At this point we stumbled upon yet another article talking about all the chemicals in disposable diapers and we decided that we aren't buying any more unless absolutely necessary. Period. We're all-in now, and we're doing great. We have some disposables "left over" that we've used when traveling, but that's it.
Cloth diapering two isn't any more work than cloth diapering one, and it sure saves a lot of money (or at least it will, now that we finally have enough diapers!). I really love the fact that the poo gets flushed down the toilet too and we have no more stinky diaper trash. And finally, I love cloth diapers because they are SO CUTE!!
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