Anyone start with CDs and end up switching to sposies?

[Selene805]

We are expecting our first in March and I really want to cloth diaper for a variety of reasons. :)
However, the start up expense is a bit daunting and I have to admit that I am a little worried about buying all these supplies (diaper covers, PFs, sprayer, wet bag, etc) only to have it turn out that CDing just won't work for us.
Should I be worrying about this? I want to have all the items I need to make CDing a positive experience for the newborn stage but I don't know if I should be more cautious about getting acessories that are long term investments.
Has anyone started out CDing with the best of intentions and then had it not work out? What made you switch to sposies?

[american_mama]

Definitely people have switched to disposables, although I did not. My advice to help you is start small so you keep your costs down. Decide what you are willing to spend on cloth and how long you will have to use it to recoup your money compared to disposables (figure on 12ish changes a day in disposables for the first month with a newborn). Don't buy too many accessories: you can just use a plastic trash bag for a while, can skip cloth wipes until you're more committed, can skip the diaper sprayer during the only breastfed stage (probably also the only formula stage too), . Their poop will be so runny you can't really rinse it well and the washer can handle it easily, albeit it is gross to watch.

An even easier alternative is to buy at one the places that have refund policies. I have just updated my cloth diaper brochure this weekend, so the places are fresh in my mind. You can use and wash the diapers for any of these program, and all the websites are good, reputable places.

www.diaperjunction.com One of every type of diaper (so about 5-6 diapers), price $58, refundable if you don’t like them. Not enough diapers for a full day in cloth, but you get a great sample and can supplement with disposables until you decide.

www.jilliansdrawers.com “Try Cloth for $10” program, $150 for 12 diapers covering all diaper types, refundable minus $10 if you don’t like them. This is enough diapers for a full day of diapering, so a great intro.

www.nickisdiapers.com Any cloth diaper item, from one diaper to dozens, is refundable for store credit within 15 days. They do sell many non-cloth items on their site, so you can probably find a way to use the store credit.

I also bought used when I started to keep my costs down. For $100, I picked and chose a variety of secondhand diapers . For me, I enjoyed doing it, but it was tedious and I made some purchase mistakes since I was so new to the whole thing, so it's not for everyone. In general, I think buying one of the trial packages above is easier and actually less risk.

[alirebco]

Well you can do a cloth diaper rental for the newborn stage if you want. There are a few companies that do them. Check out my posts from this thread - I linked to a spreadsheet comparing trial programs and also the companies that do the newborn rentals.

http://www.windsorpeak.com/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=337957

I personally don't know anyone who started with cloth and switched to disposables, in fact, I know tons of people who started with disposables and switched to cloth! And yes, it can be overwhelming in terms of what to pick because of the upfront cost, but remember that even if you can't return them, you can sell them to others for almost the full price!

[BayGirl2]

I don't know anyone IRL who started cloth and switched back. IME cloth gets addictive, like buying baby clothes, and its tempting to buy more than you need.

I agree with the PP that a trial program is a great start. Plan on sposies for the first 1-2 weeks until the yucky tar poop is gone and your life settles down a bit. But have the trial stuff ready to play with you are ready.

The resale value with cloth is a great bonus - you can sell your investment on diaperswappers.com so you're not out as much. I've lost more $$ on sposies - I have an unopened pack that I bought as a back up but never needed them once I started cloth.

[elliput]

As suggested by a PP, don't buy everything at once. You may realize you really don't need some of those extras. I have been cloth diapering DS for nearly a year now, but started with sposies so I could spread the cost of the cloth dipes over several months. I have never seen a real need for either a wet bag or a sprayer. For a pail, I use the Diaper Dekor with no liner at all. I really don't have any qualms about dunking and swishing so a sprayer, while a nice idea, just seemed a bit of a hassle and extra expense that I didn't need.

Last month, my washing machine was broken for nearly two weeks (which is a cloth users nightmare) and had to use sposies for that time. I cringed every time I threw one out as it truly was just putting money in the garbage. As soon as the repair man left the house, DS was back in cloth.

[maestramommy]

I think there was a mama here who did have to switch to sposies because CDing was giving her dc very bad diaper rash. She had tried everything, but nothing worked. I have to admit, none of my kids had diaper rash until I switched to CDing. Most CD advocates experience the opposite.

That said, barring any unforeseen circumstances I'm not switching back to sposies, not after the money and time I've invested in my stash! And my stash is super modest since I didn't switch to CDing until late in the game. Once you're doing it 100% of the time or close, it kills you every time you throw out a sposie. Laurel is still in sposies for nighttime until her AIOs arrive (hopefully tomorrow!).

[alirebco]

I think there was a mama here who did have to switch to sposies because CDing was giving her dc very bad diaper rash. She had tried everything, but nothing worked. I have to admit, none of my kids had diaper rash until I switched to CDing. Most CD advocates experience the opposite.



Yeah, DS always had a bad diaper rash in disposables and has not had one since switching to cloth 16 months ago. Some babies are sensitive to being wet and need stay dry inners (like fleece or microsuede) and some babies are sensitive to synthetic fibers (like fleece and microsuede). Most are not and we use a mix at out house.

Also, dealing with yeast can be pretty frustrating since you need to treat everything including clothes, towels and diapers and if you don't do it right, it can keep coming back.

[SnuggleBuggles]

I used a diaper service years ago with ds1. Loved it. :)

The upfront investment for cloth is $ but you can really think about what to buy and some things will be cheaper than others. I happened to really like prefolds and cheap covers like ProWraps so that was easy on the budget.

Also, consider it as an investment. If you plan to have more kids they will practically be diapered for free, save washing. That's pretty awesome!

Beth

[Wife_and_mommy]

I don't know that I'm being fair but I used cloth for 6 weeks while DS was in a special cast last year and couldn't wait to do sposies again. The laundry was a bear and far outweighed how cute the diaper covers were. They were darn cute though. ;)

I didn't buy the cloth dipes I used and love the idea of a one-time expense for them but the convenience was worth far more to me. I wish I could have loved CD.

[kijip]

Just echoing the above- yes, some people do stop cloth and go to disposables. There is no need to invest in everything before the baby arrives. For example, a sprayer is not really necessary for a fully bf baby and even later with formula or solids, it is a nice to have not a need to have. I would not buy one till cd-ing something you have tried and like to do. I have a nearly 10 month old and we have not gotten around to getting a sprayer and it's a-ok. We have 1 small wet bag and we rarely remember to use it. We don't have a special diaper pail for cloth- just a Sterilite laundry hamper.

I don't find the work involved hard so it seems easy to me to cd. You won't know until you try if it will work for you. I'd start with a an assortment of well-recommended diapers and branch out from there.

[lizzywednesday]

Do any of the CD sites mentioned above have links to diaper services? I tried to locate one for a friend who'd planned on CDing her daughter, but was really peeved that the site I found didn't have any services in our area.

[twowhat?]

I had to switch to disposables because one of my twins just could not tolerate ANY amount of pee or poop contacting her skin for longer than 30 minutes. I could not keep up with diaper changes every 30 minutes (plus the expense of having enough cloth diapers for this!) Plus, I have to use a barrier cream at EVERY diaper change and the creams that worked best for us just don't wash out of cloth diapers. I was really disappointed. We cloth diapered exclusively for 3 months before this problem cropped up, and I LOVED using cloth. I HATE throwing away all those sposies....HATE it. But for the above reasons, sposies ended up being better for us both for her skin, and for our budget.

I'll say it again...VERY disappointed. I wish we were still using cloth.

That being said, my advice is to start VERY BASIC. Prefolds and covers. Infants aren't that mobile and don't fight diaper changes, and prefolds/covers are cheap, easy to use, and easy to wash, and work well. If your baby is breastfed, we had great luck with prefolds/covers...they RARELY leaked but if we happened to use sposies, BF poop just FLIES out of them. If things are going well, then consider adding more or different types of cloth diapers. Try before buying in bulk!!

[Nooknookmom]

I did. Wish I could've kept up w/ the cloth but with a reflux baby and a pretty bad C recovery, the sposies won.

I seriously felt bad about it but if you try it and can't keep up with it, don't beat yourself up. There are worse things that can happen.

For a while I did do cloth at home and sposies when we went out but in the end Huggies won the battle for us.

Now DD's pting and I do NOT buy pull ups - she's in nice soft training pants. I see no reason to fill up the landfill with princess print disposable underwear. So maybe I redeemed myself yet, lol!

Have fun :)

[american_mama]

To the poster looking for diaper services.... Try finding one here:
http://www.diapernet.org/locate.htm

Diaper services are all locally run and owned, as far as I know. The above listing is of services that are members of a national association, but presumably not all diaper services are members. To search beyond that website, look in a local phone book, google her town and "diaper service," word-of-mouth, etc. Many La Leche Leagues have moms who cloht diaper, so you could always try contacting a La Leceh Leader via phone or email just for information about that.

[lizzywednesday]

Thanks so much for the additional tip about La Leche League moms maybe knowing of a service in the area ... I don't recall which site I'd used before my friend's shower, but I was very disappointed that there were no services left in her area (northwest NJ). Of course, I mentally kicked my mother for forgetting the name of the service that used to send Tony the diaper guy out to our house for our diaper pail when my brothers and I were kids. (Again, all 4 of us were CD babies.)

[ncat]

I did! We switched DD to sposies at 1 YO when we moved cross country and did not have our own washer and dryer (let alone most of our possesions) for several months. We did not switch back, except temporarily to combat a diaper rash. Part of the issue was that she grew and we would have to have invested in larger covers and prefolds.

We CD DS, but may switch soon - he is growing out of our stash, is super wiggly at diaper changes, starting to wet heavily, and now has nice solid poop. The CDs have been fantastic for containing runny breastfed baby poop, no longer an issue for us.

[shawnandangel]

We CD but use disposables when we travel. It's easier and people feel more comfortable! I hated asking people if they minded me washing DD's diapers in their machine. I always ran a rinse cycle with bleach after but still. . . I get how it freaked some people out.

You've been given some good CD sites, and I'll add one more to the list:

http://www.cottonbabies.com/clothdiapers.php



They have great information and also have start up kits like this one http://www.cottonbabies.com/product_info.php?cPath=22&products_id=148 so you can see if you like it.

[Lmans77]

I only CD part-time since I work FT and dont' do cloth at daycare. However, in the past 6 months or so, I've gotten lazy and gone almost FT in sposies.
I still love my cloth, it just wasn't getting worth it for me to have to do laundry for only a couple diapers a day.

I would buy a cheap nb/small stash and go from there. I always recommend Green Mountain Diapers orange edge prefolds and a cover (I liked Thirsties or something with gussets). This was our favorite nb stash and it's relatively cheap. Get a wet bag and really taht is all you need to start. You dont' need a diaper sprayer in the beginning, especially if you are breastfeeding. No need to spray, it literally dissolves in the wash.

[vonfirmath]

My sister started cloth and went to disposable. Then went back to cloth when her second child was born, and ended up back at disposable.

A girl over at another board I'm on started cloth (even had her sister make a bunch of diapers for her) then could not handle it when the babe was first born. He's 10 months now and I think she's back in cloth though.

We started disposable, went to cloth back in October. Continued in cloth for 5 months until we started having leaking problems that we couldn't solve, and are back in disposables for now.

When we have our next kid, I am planning to start in disposables (those early ick diapers, plus the whole overwhelmed being a new mom) and having prefolds and covers on hand for when the child is big enough to fit into infant (I think that's the size). And try that. I won't put the money into all-in-ones or pockets, again, I think. Though I will hold onto the ones I have. The prefolds are both cheaper and seem to be easier to solve "problems" with.

It may have been easier to continue with cloth if I'd seen a marked difference in number of rashes, but I didn't. We rarely have rashes in disposables, and we got rashes in the same circumstances in cloth. (Since I didn't see effective rash creams that didn't mess up the diapers I had, we went back to disposables after he got a rash to use Butt Paste with them because that seems to be what his rashes need. But it became very obvious, when having to go back and forth, exactly how many rashes he was getting in cloth. So it was not at all the case for us that "cloth=less rashes"

I did not find the washing to be a problem -- washing diapers was MUCH easier than washing clothes. Even the stuffing was not difficult (though I occasionally didn't find time to do it before I went to work and my husband would not "stuff as you go" -- so that would have been easier if I'd been primary caregiver. It was the leaks that finally did me in. At first, the cloth diapers were excellent, but over time they started leaking and I stripped and stripped and did everything short of buying new diapers to fix them and nothing worked.

[vonfirmath]

Also, consider it as an investment. If you plan to have more kids they will practically be diapered for free, save washing. That's pretty awesome!

Beth

This might be true for prefolds, but the more expensive diapers do not seem to be holding up for multiple children as well. After 5 months of diapering, some of my diapers are already showing quite a bit of wear. And I have friends who bought used covers (pro wraps, incidentally) off of someone and they started falling apart on her before she'd had them a year.

[pastrygirl]

I started with cloth and switched to disposables, for two reasons. The BIG one was that my husband was not on board, and it stressed him out. He wanted nothing to do with it. Without his help, I couldn't continue, because my first baby was very high-needs and I couldn't always get to the laundry.

The second reason was because I had several brands (Bumgenius, Swaddlebees, Happy Heines) and could not find one that didn't leak. If my husband had been on board, I would've probably continued searching for ones that worked.

I talked about cloth again for this baby, and my husband joked that it would be grounds for divorce...

[stillplayswithbarbies]

Also, consider it as an investment. If you plan to have more kids they will practically be diapered for free, save washing. That's pretty awesome!


Not necessarily. I thought that too, until I got to the second child and found out that most of my diapers did not last through one child and storage. Very few brands have elastic that is still working. Righteous Baby and El Bee are good. Fuzzibunz, SOS, Firefly are all unusable. (I stored them in a bedroom closet, so it wasn't even attic heat that did them in, just time.)

[egoldber]

I started with cloth and switched to disposables, for two reasons. The BIG one was that my husband was not on board, and it stressed him out. He wanted nothing to do with it.

With Sarah, I started with disposable and then went to cloth. With Amy I did a little cloth with her, but she was in the NICU and then reflux-y and high needs and I could not keep up.

And like the PP above, my DH was never fully on board, so it was all me with the laundry and the change and frankly it got old. So I switched back to disposables after only a few months of cloth with Amy.

[brittone2]

Not necessarily. I thought that too, until I got to the second child and found out that most of my diapers did not last through one child and storage. Very few brands have elastic that is still working. Righteous Baby and El Bee are good. Fuzzibunz, SOS, Firefly are all unusable. (I stored them in a bedroom closet, so it wasn't even attic heat that did them in, just time.)

This happened with some of ours. Some survived, some didn't. My kids are 3 years apart. Many of my FBs from my oldest were used in a smallish rotation though so they were kinda abused by me anyway ;)

I just had some prefitteds made from my stash of prefolds, and I asked the woman doing the conversion for me if she could fix FB elastic for me. I sent her in a few that needed fixed and she did a great job from what I can tell.

Many of our dipes did just fine and were usable from our first to our 2nd chidl though.

[AnnieW625]

I don't know anyone IRL who started cloth and switched back. IME cloth gets addictive, like buying baby clothes, and its tempting to buy more than you need.

I agree with the PP that a trial program is a great start. Plan on sposies for the first 1-2 weeks until the yucky tar poop is gone and your life settles down a bit. But have the trial stuff ready to play with you are ready.

The resale value with cloth is a great bonus - you can sell your investment on diaperswappers.com so you're not out as much. I've lost more $$ on sposies - I have an unopened pack that I bought as a back up but never needed them once I started cloth.

I was a cloth diapered baby as were my brother and sister (mom said she used Pampers on vacation only) and I felt oh soo guilty for using disposables because no one ever talked about cloth anymore. I knew of a diaper service in my area (it was the one that my Grandma used with my dad almost 60 years ago), but I just never got around to getting it set up. I didn't find out about all of the advances in cloth diapering until and still how popular it was until DD was almost a year old. I plan on CDing #2 because DD has really sensitive skin and I'd rather just start with cloth and use Seventh Generation Disposables (the only ones that didn't irritate DD's but) when needed. Also those pre fold cloth diapers (IE: classic Gerber ones) have multiple uses so if you decide on those keep a few; they last forever and are good for general cleanups around the house.

Also I am sure this is purely a mothering instinct you are having because there is soo much to think about with your first baby but you do have another 4+ mos. to make a decision about what you are going to do so don't be hard on yourself in six months if A. the cloth diapering thing didn't work out or B. it's just easier to use disposables when out and such.