I wouldn't recommend the disposable diaper pails that they have on the market for cloth. They are super expensive and most use those expensive bags. Any good sturdy trash can with a lid (get a little fancy with the ones with the foot pedal that opens the lids!) will do the job and not cost you a ton. Plus you can get a washable/reusable liner that just gets tossed in with the dipes :)
Awesome tip, thank you!
An easy peasy way to start is w/a dozen or two prefolds and a few velcro covers. That is my preferred method anyway. I am not really into the more expensive, although cute, fitteds and such.
I have to agree with you Annabelle. We never liked the pockets as much as a prefold/snappie with a wool soaker combo. We travel ALOT! Monthly to MA (7 hours each way) and we never used disposables. We did use some of our "fancier" diapers Green Mountian Fitteds (they snap but need a cover) because it is easier for those quick standing changes in dirty bathrooms YUCK! As for diaper cream we used fleece inserts that we cut from reminant fleece and lined our diapers. If they got gross after a while we would toss them. It saved our diapers. We liked Burt Bee's diaper cream which doesn't seem to stain as much.
Haven't had a chance to read all the responses yet, but wanted to chime in with my experiences with this!
We used sposies on our first two. I always hated spending all that money on dipes just to throw them away and buy another pack next week! Plus, I read that it can take something like 500 years for one disposable dipe to break down in a landfill. Crazy much? I do try to be friendly to the Earth God gave us. When our second came within PT realm, I opted to buy waterproof cloth pullups instead of sposie ones. It was then that I got in the habit of washing them every other day and I saw that as truly no big deal. When our 3rd baby was on the way, I bought about $300 of those one size BumGenius pocket diapers and absolutely loved them. They saw both our 3rd and 4th babies all through their dipey days with the best of times. At this point, the velcro is wearing out and so is the leg elastic, but I simply contacted Cotton Babies (where they were purchased from) and asked what my options were. A rep told me that they sell repair kits, comes with instructions and is pretty easy to do, but that she would send me however many kits I needed for absolutely free! Now that is right up my alley! Not only do I recommend CD, but I recommend the new BGs 4.0 from Cotton Babies, too!
BTW, going out in public has never been an issue for us. I just grab a wetbag, spray it with eucalyptis oil (sp?), pack it in the diaper bag with enough CDs to get us through our outing and some cloth wipes, and go. Diaper changes are just the same as sposies, only you keep your dipes and wipes in the wetbag and get to reuse them. Easy!!
I just want to thank you all again for the wonderful information! I went from thinking that CD would be a huge hassle to thinking that it's the only way that makes sense! Being that I'm on a limited budget, I really don't have $100+ a month to spend on diapers and wipes. I can do a big initial investment that will carry me through though. Thank you thank you thank you!
we used cloth since day one out of the hospital (i didn't pack enough to use in the hospital after our planned homebirth became a hospital c/s). i like the pre-folds with fleece cover. our chubby leg baby didn't fit well in the fitted diapers we borrowed (ds became chapped). we used wool covers when he was little and then started ecing at 3 months and i liked the ease of unsnapping a cover and tearing off a pre-fold to get him on the potty. as far as cream we didn't use one for the longest time (and still don't). we put a little lotion on his chapped skin. our diapers have never stained and the water we wash them in is hot so we haven't needed to re-strip them. i wash diapers every 3-5 days (depending how often i catch). early on it was every other day. but the baby was going a lot more. we use cloth while traveling as we stay with family and can use their washer. we have never had a problem with using cloth. the bag we use for dirty diapers is a reused plastic bag that held new baby clothes that we received at the baby shower. we always rinsed out/shook out poo diapers from a fleece liner which keeps the diaper in good shape. good luck to you!
Jenni I am also trying to research CD and I am totally new to them. I used disposable with dd1 and do not want to use them with dd2. I am going to a CD workshop at a local store this Saturday. I think it will be helpful for me to learn about them in person, they are also going to go over cleaning and storage stuff too. Maybe you could find something like that in your area.
I also agree with pp that it doesn't have to be one or the other. I plan to use biodegrable disposible when we are on trips and stuff like that. I will not be working but with dd1 I did and I remember her childcare caring what diapers I sent with her, I was wondering how your childcare feels about you using CD with them. You may want to discuss it with them hopefully they will be supportive.
I found the CD board on MCD really helpful too in case you haven't checked it out. Those ladies know their CD 
oops something was wrong and this got triple posted.
oops. Something was odd and this got triple-posted!
We used cloth--mostly prefolds and velcro covers (we love the Thirsties brand because of the gussets). Along the way I picked up a few all-in-ones and hybrids to make diaper changes in public faster and to use at the Mothers Day Out program our son is in. I might get mud thrown at me for saying this
, but cloth diapering seems like a bit more work. Putting on a prefold and a cover is like putting on two disposable diapers. Pocket diapers are easy to put on, but you have to stuff them ahead of time. Same for the hybrid/AI2 type which require some sort of assembling. All-in-ones are super easy all around, but also usually super expensive and can take forever to dry. Cloth takes up a bunch of room in a diaper bag, so those cute purse sized options might not be an option if you use cloth. You may have to spend months figuring out a wash routine that works for you and your water-when we moved to a house with hard well-water it took 4 months and an in house water softener to fix all our new problems. But...I still far prefer cloth!
I love being the only person at Walmart with a baby/toddler who DOESN'T have a big package of diapers in the cart. I love the cute and colorful cloth diaper options. I love the cloth diapered bubble butt look! I love never having to fear that I will run out of diapers--in a pinch I could use dish towels, though its never come to that. I love not having to buy diapers every week (we initially went with cloth because I had a good paying job while pregnant, but wasn't sure what our financial state would be after baby came). Now that baby #2 is on the way, I loved digging through my diaper stash and realizing I was totally set and don't need to purchase anything else. I love how well our diapers contained those newborn poop blowouts. I didn't even know what a poop blowout was until we went on a weekend trip and used disposables. Yikes! Poop got EVERYWHERE. The next time we traveled we just took our cloth and some bags to keep the dirties in.
We used cloth wipes at home, but disposable wipes while we were out and about. If you choose disposable wipes you can just throw them in your cute wet bag and wash/dry them with the diapers. Then you can pick out the nice clean and dry disposable wipes and throw them away instead of trying to separate them from the cloth diapers when both are dirty or wet.
While I'm on this long rant I'll throw in my two cents about hybrids. We have about 6 of the Grovia hybrid and I really like them, though I use them more as an all-in-one. (Meaning I don't bother snapping in a new liner and reusing the cover, I just get a totally new one each time). We have a box of the disposable liners and after trying it out once, to me the hype about a disposable liner and a reusable cover doesn't make sense. It seems like the worst of both worlds: The disposable insert footprint seems only neglibibly less then a full on disposable diaper. But you still have to deal with a cloth cover. So you have to separate the disposable liner from the cloth cover. Throw the disposable liner away . Get out a new liner and place it in the cloth cover (and if the cloth cover got dirty or wet the cloth cover has to be separated and put in a wetbag). You will still be coming home with a bag full of wet or dirty covers which you have to keep up with and you are still throwing a disposable liner into a landfill. Maybe it works for some people, but I'd rather use all cloth while I'm out. We have also used disposables when it made more sense to do so (on a long trip where we didn't want to have to do laundry). Anyone actually like the disposable part of the hybrid dipes?
I've been Googling CD stuff like crazy the past couple of days, and I just came across the Bummis organic cloth diapering kit. They have an infant size (7-15 lbs) and a baby size (15-30 lbs). The infant kit has 24 infant size Organic Cotton Prefold diapers (4 x 8 x 4 layers thick), 4 Super Whisper Wraps – small, 2 Super Brites – small, 3 rolls Bio-Soft liners – small, 5 reusable Fleece Liners, Fabulous Wet Bag – large (available exclusively in the Kit!), and a User Guide. It's $125 to $170 for the kit (depending on the online store) and it seems like a pretty good value to me. I like the idea of the all-in-ones, and I was actually playing around with the Bum Genius 4.0 at a store a little while ago, but I like the idea that I can wash the prefold part separately from the wrap. 24 prefolds seems like a lot to me too. I know I'd probably be washing half of them every day for the first few months, but I'll be out of school this summer so it's not really that big of a deal to me.
I think I'm going to have to do what mad4mady is doing and try to find a CD workshop in my area so I can experiment with the various types of diapers and see how they all work.
For those mommas that had questions about CD, I just found a GREAT resource with all kinds of extra information about CD and the various products, definitions and more. http://www.naturallytrendy.com/category_60/cloth-diapers.htm The website also sells tons of different products for CD as well as other baby-momma-earth friendly products. There's a pretty cool looking diaper bag in there too!
I'm really excited that we're having a cloth dipe discussion. I am loving talking about cloth these days as I accumulate my stash for a tiny guy.
There really are so many options with cloth. We started out with just prefolds and some Thirsties covers (still our fav. cover). When she hit about 6mo. old and outgrew the infant prefolds, I switched over to fitteds because she's so petite, they just fit better with less bulk. Now we use some fitteds some pockets and it works great.
I think they're easier that disposables just because there's no explosions to clean up! We have a couple of babysitters and they have no issue with pocket diapers. One of them even told me that she feels funny using disposables at others peoples house because even she likes cloth better :) hehe.
Also, like others have said, don't stress too much about getting a fancy diaper pail etc. We just use a wet bag and have it on the floor next to our toilet (no space for an actual bin).
Good luck! there are lots of resources around here.
24 prefolds seems like a lot to me too.
In the newborn/infant stage 24 prefolds is not a lot. For a while in the newborn stage we were washing diapers every day and decided to actually count to see how many we had gone through in a 24 hour period--and the count was 24! Granted, some of this was due to our colicky baby who cried at the slightest touch of wetness and also to our newness as parents. If DS was crying all we knew to do was either feed or change him--so we did a lot of both for a while there! We had 36 prefolds in the infant size and that was probably a good number for us. Once the kiddo got a bit older 24 would have been more than enough. 24 may be more than enough for you from the get-go, just depends on you and your child.
If there is any chance of seeing/feeling different diaper options in person I'd recommend it.
I also will admit that I like having extra prefolds not just for diapers :P I used them post partum as pads (LOVED THEM) and I like keeping some for drying up spills in the kitchen (super absorbant and washable!) and occasionally have used two to dry after a shower when the towels were in the wash :P They are so versatile.
I went to the CD workshop I had posted about yesterday and I have to say I learned a lot. It was a great chance to really learn about the different products. Also, there were a lot of people there that had great questions I would have never thought to ask. I really recommend going to one of these for 1st time CDing.
Megan
I went to the CD workshop I had posted about yesterday and I have to say I learned a lot. It was a great chance to really learn about the different products. Also, there were a lot of people there that had great questions I would have never thought to ask. I really recommend going to one of these for 1st time CDing.
Megan
I'm still trying to find one of these in my area and so far I have been completely unsuccessful.
I did talk to my mom about CDing because she had both my younger sister and me in CD. She said that she had about 70 dipes and anything less wouldn't have been enough. However, this was also in 1979 - 1983ish so she didn't have a washer and dryer in the house and she line dried the dipes, which takes longer so you need more. Since we have a high efficiency front-loading washer and dryer that are across the hall from my room I'm thinking that I'll go with the Bummis infant starter kit and buy an extra dozen or so prefolds and start with that.
I was just googling around and I found this deal; http://www.thanksmama.com/Econobum_cloth_diapers_p/bmg-036.htm
It's $50 for 12 one-size prefolds and 3 one-size covers. It seems like this is a better deal than getting a kit that only has the newborn size prefolds and covers, and spending $150 or more and then having to buy a whole new supply a few months later when the baby outgrows them. I'm thinking about buying 2 or 3 of these kits and that should do it for me.
Thoughts from the expert CD mamas?
That's a decent deal, the econobum covers are some of my favorite. But something to keep in mind: the one size prefolds will seem HUGE on a newborn, and once the child hits about 22-25 lbs, they'll get difficult again. But that 1 year in between those to stages and they'll be great :)
What is the difference between the birdseye cotton prefolds and the cotton twill prefolds? Gerber has the birdseye fabric. Is is less durable? Less absorbent? I'm having a heck of a time finding prefolds that aren't totally expensive for a dozen.
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