One Month of Cloth Diapering
It’s been just a little over a month now since we started using cloth diapers, and I am definitely still sold on it – more than I really expected I would be! Within the first couple weeks we had figured out our routine. I’m not changing Erik quite as religiously every two hours as I did at first. I learned that most of the time, all that happens if I have to wait longer for some reason is that his pants get a little wet, so I end up doing a little more laundry due to extra pants being worn. And sometimes, depending on what else is going on in my day, that is a better alternative to dropping everything at a particular moment for a diaper change when two hours has passed on the clock. I’ve learned how to add extra layers to Erik’s diapers at night, and even at nap time, so that he can sleep as long as he needs to without an overflowing diaper waking him up.
I’m generally doing diaper laundry once every two to two-and-a-half days. All the wet diapers get thrown in a plain cotton laundry bag, which also gets washed with each diaper load. When we’re out and about, I throw the wet ones in a ziplock bag. You can get some nice washable “water resistant” fabric bags to use for this purpose, but so far we’ve only actually used two ziplock bags (drying it out in between uses). A friend lent us some extra supplies, and having a couple more covers and some thinner flannel prefolds (to use as those extra “doubling” layers when Erik sleeps) makes a big difference in being able to go as long as 2.5 days without doing diaper laundry.
The system of using “pocket diapers” at night and prefolds with covers during the day seems like a good combination for us. Lately we’ve been fighting off various colds and other bugs in our house…and when those dirty diapers are looking more greenish purple than the normal colors…I am glad that those nasty messes are generally in my $2-ish prefolds rather than my more expensive pocket diapers. I am just less paranoid about the stains, knowing that if we have to replace a few because the stains get too bad, it won’t be a huge expense (and some of those stains might “sun out” in a few months when the weather warms up and I can actually try drying them out in the sun!).
And we got a diaper sprayer…which has already seen three incarnations. This has turned out to be the most unexpectedly exciting part of our cloth diapering adventure. Having seen pictures of diaper sprayers on the web, Tony was pretty confident he could build one for less on his own. Soon after having installed the first version of the sprayer he realized he had purchased the wrong type of tubing. It was working for the time being, so we left it installed, happily spraying off those messy diapers. Tony told me to keep a close eye on it, and sure enough, after maybe 2 or 3 weeks of use, the tubing sprung a leak. I was able to act quickly and shut off water to the toilet. Only a small wet mess was made in the process, and Tony was able to purchase new, stronger tubing later that same day.
Then, disaster struck. The very night that Tony installed the new tubing on the sprayer, something happened in the middle of the night and the sprayer head came off the tubing. Unfortunately, we were deeply asleep when this happened and had a humidifier running in our bedroom so we didn’t hear anything right away. I was awoken by the sound of our downstairs neighbor banging on our door and yelling for help. Hearing this noise combined with the random noises coming from the bathroom due to water shooting out the end of the diaper sprayer tubing, I immediately came to the conclusion that our house was on fire. Why I thought this when there were no smoke alarms going off I will never know, but that is how my brain processed the information! This might not have been such a bad thing, because me yelling “fire” several times actually woke Tony up and got him out of bed quickly.
As soon as we were both out of bed we quickly figured out what was really going on, and Tony got the water turned off at the toilet…but not before a big mess had been made in the basement apartment below us. Tony helped our downstairs neighbor clean up the worst of the mess right then. Luckily there is kitchen tile right below our bathroom, so most of the damage was contained to wet, soggy ceiling tiles, which Tony went ahead and replaced the next day.
Wary of having anything constantly under pressure and connected to our toilet, Tony devised a “hook on to the sink” version of the diaper sprayer that is working really well for us. It only takes a couple of seconds to hook it on to the bathroom sink and turn on the sink water…and then a few more seconds at the end of the spraying process to disconnect and drain the sprayer hose. But now we can sleep easier knowing there will be no further middle-of-the-night floods…or curious children finding a sprayer and making a real mess in the bathroom (which never happened in the two or three weeks that it was connected to the toilet, but I kept envisioning that some day it was bound to happen!). We can also take this sink-based diaper sprayer with us when we travel, if we chose to take cloth diapers with us on our trips.
This whole process proved costly, in that we had to buy all the parts for the three incarnations of the sprayer, plus ceiling tiles to replace the soggy ones in the basement. It’s not to say a DIY sprayer attached to the toilet couldn’t work with the right combination of parts – we just didn’t get that right combination in time! Buying one of the commercially-available sprayers is probably the best bet for most people!
The middle-of-the-night diaper sprayer crisis actually made me realize how I am really feeling about the cloth diapers. While Tony was in the basement cleaning up water puddles at 4am, I was lying in bed awake, worrying that Tony might tell me that we would need to be done with cloth diapers after this fiasco. And that made me fairly sad. I decided I had actually become somewhat attached to the idea of cloth diapering.
Tony was more than willing for us to continue with our cloth diapering, and I have had some time to think about why I am enjoying cloth diapering so much when it is actually more work (though not as much work as I feared it might be before we started). It’s definitely not just about the money savings – I rarely think about how we’re saving money by not buying lots of disposables. It might be a little bit about not having to make so many trips to Target just because we needed diapers, and about having Erik’s diaper rashes heal two or three times faster and stay away longer.
But I think the main reason I enjoy it is the appeal to the “do it yourself” side of my nature. Maybe it’s the same thing that causes us to bake our own bread when it doesn’t necessarily save any money over Aldi bread and may in some ways be less healthy since our bread is not “whole wheat”. I just like having something I can take care of myself and use over and over again. Even in the midst of a huge snowstorm or some other crisis I could keep Erik in diapers and not have to worry about running out. Just watch, the next thing you know we’ll be grinding our own wheat or roasting our own coffee…err, wait we already roast our own coffee. 
Needless to say, we plan on cloth diapering baby #3 as well. I am thinking we might use disposables for the first week or two while we get used to the grueling schedule of waking up for middle-of-the-night feedings and while we will probably have family around who will want to help out with things like diaper changes. But, I am looking forward to the continued adventure that having two kids in cloth diapers will bring!
