Thursday, September 30, 2010

Why I Cloth Diaper

I mean, really, could you not see this one coming? :) I figured I'd start the series with a pretty non-controversial topic, and by now you've probably learned how much I love to talk about fluff.
I actually wanted to cloth diaper my children before we even had kids. When Mike and I first got married, I worked in a daycare, taking care of infants. I changed more diapers than most people change in their entire lifetime. I figured cloth would be cheaper, and with breastfed babies, you might as well use cloth since their diapers are constantly leaking all over their clothes. But Mike told me I was crazy, and when Gehrig came along, he said no way to cloth.
So Gehrig was in disposables for the first year of his life (a fact that I hate now, thinking about all that wasted money). I had a friend who got into cloth diapers, and I once again brought it up to Mike, but we were on such a tight budget that we couldn't invest in a whole stash at the time. But I was still interested. Another friend recommended a bunch of good sites to me including diaperswappers. You can find some really good deals! And the mamas there are awesome--I wrote that I was really wanting to start using cloth, but we didn't have much money to start a stash. An awesome mama wrote me and told me that if I would just pay for the shipping, she would send me a box of diapers. I wasn't expecting too much since I didn't even know this lady, but when I got the box, I was ecstatic. She had sent me a whole stash--and they were good diapers too!
Mike still wasn't convinced about cloth, but he agreed to let me try it if he didn't have to change any. It was so much easier than I'd expected. And very addicting. The diapers are so cute, and every time you think of all those boxes of disposables you don't have to buy, you feel like a pretty awesome mom.
So the number one reason I cloth diaper is to save money. You can find really great deals, and cloth diapers have great resale value. You can sell them for almost as much as you paid for them. Mike, who, as you will remember, was so against them, now sings their praises to anyone who asks.
Another reason is our house no longer stinks since there are no dirty diapers sitting in the trash can. And they never leak--Logan has not gotten one stain on his clothes. So they're also helping save money on clothes too!
I have to admit that the fact that they're green is pretty low on my list of reasons, but it's still a good reason. We do need to take care of our planet!
And, of course, I use them because they're adorable. I absolutely love dressing Logan in just a t-shirt and a diaper (although those days are pretty much over since it's gotten cooler). I see pictures of babies in just disposable diapers and think, why even bother? Disposables aren't cute. Stick a cloth diaper on that baby--if only just for the picture--and it'll be ten times cuter.
So...does cloth diapering make me a better mother? Not necessarily--it makes me personally a better mother than I would be if I didn't cloth diaper since I feel that cloth is best for us. But it doesn't make me a better mother than another mother who doesn't use cloth. But it does make my babies cuter. :)

2 comments:

  1. Good for you! As you know, I'm not into cloth but I am glad you are so passionate about it. I don't think it makes you any better than myself in parenting as we each have made our own decisions. There are many reasons that I don't use cloth. One is simply the fact that we actually don't spend all that much money on diapers since people in our church buy us boxes of them all the time. And they are not the cheap-o ones, either! So that is a blessing for us! And I am super picky about not having a stinky diaper, so they immediately go outside the house in the outside garbage! Who wants a stinky house, huh? ;-)

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  2. That is nice that people buy you diapers! We used to keep disposables around "just in case," but now we don't have a disposable in the house. Before Logan's umbilical cord fell off, we used disposables and would go through a pack every two days!

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