Sorry this is so long, but it's VERY important to us.

Alright all you people in internet-land!! We’ve made the decision. We’re sticking with this decision. And we’ll need your support to make this work! We’re cloth diapering our baby!


We have weighed the pros and cons with each other and have decided that the money saved would be enough to sell us on the idea. But, on top of that you add that it’s better for baby and for the environment and we’re hopping on the cloth train! WOO WOO!!!

First, let’s talk cost. It will be approximately $500 to keep a diaper on our child’s heiny from birth to potty training. It seems like “Oh $500 for a new parent, that’s a lot isn’t it?” but really that’s a considerable savings. Most parents who use disposable diapers on their children will spend between 1500-2000 on diapers between birth and potty training! So overall that’s a savings of 1000-1500 over the infancy of ONE child. NOW take into account that we plan to have several children, all of whom will be cloth diapered! We’ll probably have to re-invest about $75-100 for each child for things that have worn out or we’d prefer to replace. SO, if we have 3 children. We’ll spend about $800 total on diapers. That’s STILL a significant savings over putting just ONE baby in disposables. But when you consider disposables on three kids that could easily be almost 6000 dollars! OMG, right? I’d rather spend $800 than $6000.

Now, why is putting cloth on my child better than sticking plastic and petroleum by-product and recycled car tires and old bleached tree fluff next to my child’s skin? Good question. Since disposable diapers have been around babies have been getting diaper rashes more than ever. It’s because children’s skin is sensitive. You wouldn’t rub half the stuff in those diapers on your face, so why would you want it sitting right up against your baby’s skin for a couple of hours at a time? Not to mention disposables aren’t as breathable and so they will actually trap that moisture next to the skin as opposed to letting it out some. Also, parents who cloth-diaper are more likely to change a diaper that’s only a little bit wet than a disposable-using parent. A lot of parents who use “sposies” don’t want to throw away a diaper that hasn’t been used to its full extent so they will keep a child who’s only peed a little in the diaper. I’m sure the kids LOVE that, right? Whereas, as parent who cloth-diaper will take the diaper off, throw it or just the liner in the pail and re-diaper the kid in a fresh dry diaper. It doesn’t make the load of laundry any harder or more expensive, so why think twice about changing a barely soiled diaper?

Now, when a parent takes that disposable diaper off their child what happens to it? It gets folded up in a neat little package and stuck into a fancy, smell-reducing, individually wrapping, diaper trash can. Then what? To the landfill, to sit for hundreds of years until the plastic and petroleum by-products can break down. Not that they’ll break down into anything that’s good for the environment. They’ll break down into chemicals that will leach into the water table and HOPEFULLY be filtered out over a matter of years and years through gravel and sand and rock and then through city sanitation services (maybe, unless you have a well.) Then those chemicals are just hanging out in the Earth in a place where they weren’t supposed to be. WONDERFUL, right? There have been arguments that, because of extra water being used to wash and energy to dry, cloth diapers turn out to be just as harmful to the Earth as “sposies.” I don’t buy it. If I take one extra step (spraying them off with a diaper sprayer) with my diapers before tossing them in the pail (and only the poopy diapers, not the just wet ones) I will be able to put my diapers in a regular wash cycle with original Tide powder detergent. So, it’s the same as doing a load of towels. Then all summer long I can put my diapers on a clothes line to dry in the sun. Not only will they be using “solar” energy to dry, but the sun is also the best stain fighter there is. With my clothes, I can’t line dry them. They get stiff and scratchy, because they’re made of all kinds of fake stuff. But a 100% cotton baby diaper will be soft to the touch when you take it off the line. That’s the best thing you can do for the environment. And if you choose to use a “natural” detergent that is biodegradable, that’s just one more step closer to making cloth diapers more Earth friendly than disposables.

We’ve decided that we will refrain from putting disposables on our baby from day one. We will bring cloth to the hospital. We will leave cloth with family if they’re babysitting. We will use cloth at home and on the go. It’s good for us, it’s good for baby, and it’s good for the Earth.