Diapering 101 Please??

[courtneys]

Hi, well I am not preggo yet but we are actively trying, fingers crossed it will happen this month. But I am seriously considering cloth diapering with baby 2. We have a 20month old now, and I am also considering switching her to cloth, but I really know nothing about it nor do I know anyone who uses them.


Please help with what is REALLY needed to get started, and the basic steps and tricks to it......what products work best in our climate?? Lower Alabama; hot and humid. How often do you really change the diaper?

Excited to hear all the good tips! Thanks. Courtney

[ccook]

If you want to learn about cloth diapers, check out this board:
http://diaperdivas.proboards57.com/index.cgi
The girls there can give you tons of info on how to use them, how to make them, what they prefer, etc.
I switched to cloth when ds was 2 mos old and I love them! I started out buying some (fuzzi bunz are my favorite name brand, from what I tried) but then I started making them. Ds has been in them for 6 months now and I don't plan to ever go back. I originally switched for the environment, but after seeing how soft and comfy they are, I actually feel sorry for babies when I see them in plastic diapers. Good luck, I hope you find the cloth love as well!!

[courtneys]

Thank you. I'll check it out.

[tankgirl73]

Now is also the time to research into elimination communication or 'diaper-free'. I went into it a complete skeptic but couldn't hurt to try it out. I was quickly convinced and I now have a 22mo DD who's basically potty-trained and hasn't been in diapers since she was 5mo... we used slim training pants after that and gradually moved more and more to undies, now she's in undies full-time with heavier trainers for overnight -- which are still dry in the morning 9 times out of 10.

It can be done full-time, part-time, or just occasionally, and however it's applied in your life, it's just another option to having baby's little bum full-time encased in a portable toilet -- no matter how cloth and cushy and comfy, that's still what it is, a trap which will hold pee and poo against their delicate little baby skin! Once I had the mind-leap to thinking of it that way, I couldn't bear to keep a diaper on her unless absolutely necessary!

At the very least, it reduces the number of diapers that you use, and so reduces the amount of washing for cloth diapers. Every "catch" of a pee is a diaper that can stay on that much longer, and every catch of a poo is a whooooooole lot of work saved lol...

Anyway, there's a great EC forum here as well as on yahoo groups, my fave book to recommend would probably be Gross-Loh's The Diaper-Free Baby and of course there are a TON of websites if you do a bit of googling. EC'ers tend to also be avid cloth diaperers rather than using sposies, so you'll get lots of great advice on caring for and using cloth too.