Wednesday, July 16, 2008

Slowly Becoming Green

After two years of dragging my heels, my good friend, Gina, at Little Lions finally convinced me to try cloth diapers with Alayna. Two years ago, I gave up trying to use cloth as Josiah absolutely HATED to have his diaper changed and I was never fast enough to fold, fasten, and cover before we had a full blown scream going. Plus, with him in day care, "sposies" were my only option.

However, now that we are on a new family budget where there is no student loan supplementing our one salary household, I thought I would give cloth a try again....it would save us nearly $50/month, and that's not using the more expensive brand of disposable.

During the last week and a half that I've been using cloth (I wanted to wait until after we got situated in our new place before I started using them), I have noticed a few "not so great" things....

1. Cloth diapers, across the board, make Laney's bottom look twice as large, every girl's worst nightmare.
2. There is an extra load of laundry to be washed every other day.
3. Cloth diapers result in even more hesitation from Randy to change them. However, he DID change her diapers on Sunday while I took a nap (I just made sure that the diaper was stuffed and ready to go).
4. Once Laney starts eating solids, I'll need to spray/rinse the poopy diapers prior to wash (this is the negative that I'm really not looking forward to).

On the flip side, though, there are positives to using cloth.

1. Using cloth will save us ~ $50/month on diapers (I'm still using disposable with Josiah).
2. I love not having to run out to the store "last minute" because I realize all of a sudden that I had used the last diaper in the previous diaper change.
3. I just LOVE how the sun bleaches the breastmilk poop stains out of the diapers, leaving white/crisp diapers behind. :-)
4. Using cloth helps the environment by reducing the amount of "it will take years to decompose" trash.




While I've had my reasons for not wanting to "go cloth" sooner, I'm really glad I decided to give it another try.

2 comments:

Elizabeth said...

Don't tell Alayna, but her butt does look kind of big. A small price to pay, if you ask me. She's gorgeous!

bevy said...

Whoa, those diapers are huge! I've thought about going cloth myself, but just not too sure about it still. Either you ruin the environment or you use a lot of water washing all the time. Still debating it.