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Gave up on cloth at night - confession.

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diapering
682 views 10 replies 11 participants last post by  Millie Ivy 
#1 ·
I feel guilty and am usually my worst critic. I love CD but 19 month old DD is an extremely heavy wetter and my routine has been stripping her bed once or twice most nights, including of course changing her PJs, blankets/sleep sack. I have some rumparooz pockets which hold a LOT but it's just not enough. When I try to stuff extra boosters/doublers then the white fleece shows and the wetness wicks out. Regular sposies aren't enough either and I had to get night time pull ups :-/ . They are expensive, Disney branded (ugh) and I have lovely CDs.... But she's down to waking once a night! I don't have to strip her and the bed! I can't argue with that and I only use cloth during the day. Ok so there it is. Feels good to get it out. Anyone else have super heavy wetting toddlers? What works for you at night?
 
#2 ·
Hi there, my DD (14 months) is a pretty heavy wetter too... on the occasions when we've used sposies (trips and such) she regularly pees through them, which is a major pain. We always have used prefolds + covers for normal daily stuff, and at night we use two prefolds (one the normal size, one a size smaller folded up inside) + cover. She has never ever leaked at night that way (though if she sleeps a really long time she occasionally starts to leak while nursing the next morning, but that's rare!). You could try it...prefolds are quite cheap, and so are covers if you just need one or two. We have Green Mountain Diapers prefolds and Thirsties covers, and love them.

But I just wanted to say...please don't feel like a failure! Heck, you CD during the day, that's better than most people. I consider myself a pretty diehard CD person (we CDed without a washing machine or dryer--looking back, it was crazy!)...but really, if it doesn't work for you, it doesn't work for you. Don't be ashamed of it, that's just the way things go!
 
#3 ·
No guilt allowed!!

We use a disposable at night, and have for both of our babes. Our daughter was a nightmare to get to sleep but she slept well once she got to sleep. However, she would wake if she was wet and then one of us (me) was back in the rocking chair post-diaper change. She'd sleep through the night (except for semi-awake night nursing) in a disposable so we did that and didn't look back. We didn't even try using cloth at night with our son....just a disposable from the get go.

Its hard enough to stay on top of laundry without adding frequent wet sheets and nightclothes to the mix. Carry on, and remember that in addition to your time and sanity with extra laundry, there's added energy, water, and soap to do it, as well as energy/chemical expenditure at the waste water treatment plant to process the extra wash water.
 
#4 ·
Heck yeah. I spent tons of time, money, and frustration trying to find a nighttime CD solution for DD1. With DD2 I just decided to bite the bullet on the nighttime disposable and it has made things so so very much better.
 
#5 ·
Yup, us too. It started with DD1 being a terrible sleeper, but she would sleep pretty well with just semi-awake periods if she wore disposables, but as soon as I spent a small fortune on bamboo fitteds with a wool cover, an extra booster and fleece liners, she started waking each time she peed and being *really* hard to settle for the rest of the night. I tried prefolds too, and a variety of pockets. Maybe it's because she started out in disposables, who knows? But she was also getting frequent yeast infections which stopped once we went back to disposables at night. DD2 also gets woken up by the feeling of wetness when I did CDs on her at night, so I again switched back to disposables too. It really sucks, cause I do love CDs!!

I noticed that the Wal-Mart pull ups worked really well for us; we never had any leaks, but, if you need the Huggies brand pull-ups, I know they're a bit cheaper at Costco.
 
#6 ·
My DS wasn't even that heavy of a wetter (that's a strange phrase!) and I still switched to disposables around 12 months (thankfully he potty trained at 18 months, so it wasn't that long.) DS would soak through his diaper every every few nights, and since he wasn't a great sleeper to begin with, we avoided any disruption in his sleep that we possible could. I felt guilty about it for awhile, but realized that the guilt wasn't helping anyone, so I threw it out with the sposies ;)
 
#7 ·
Although Cd'ing is great for the environment and great for your DD her getting a good night's sleep is so important (and you getting enough sleep too, so you can be a great mama), so no guilt allowed! You're still using cloth during the day, so I don't think one Pull-Up a day really matters.

If you want to keep trying different configurations of cloth to see if you can get one to work for her I would try having her sleep on a fleece blanket. It will keep the actual crib sheets dry so you can pull it off if it gets soaked, but it will probably just dry quickly and hopefully she won't even wake!
 
#8 ·
So glad I read this! I've been feeling guilty too, but I'm glad to know I'm not the only doing this. We use Huggies overnights, I got a subscription through Amazon, they arrive every 2 months and as long as nobody messes up and uses them during the day, we are good with the 60 pack. Before that it was terrible. Some nights we'd be fine, using a BumGenius diaper with 2 microfiber and one hemp/bamboo insert, but others it'd leak. We also had hit and miss with prefolds ( 2 refolds + 1 insert for extra protection) and Thirsties covers. My main problem was that what worked one night wouldn't the next, and I'd have to strip the bed, lose slight, etc. We finally caved and got the overnight disposable diapers. We've all gotten much more sleep since then, even though I sometimes still wish I could stick to cloth 24/7.
 
#9 ·
We also reluctantly started using a disposable at night at around 7months when our LO started sleeping longer stretches and really not wanting to wake up at night, although she was still taking in plenty of milk in the evening and overnight, and peeing a lot by morning. It was easier and less disruptive for everyone to avoid diaper changes during the night, and none of our cloth combinations lasted 12 hours. We settled on pampers baby dry, after some experimentation with others that leaked after all night (even these were often bulging by the morning, but rarely leaked).

HOWEVER, I think a lot of us would be happy to go back to cloth at night if it worked out, so I have a couple of suggestions to share:

1. Natural fibers! Some of you are talking about microfibers, but synthetic inserts like those that come with most pockets are not actually as absorbant as natural fibers like cotton, bamboo and hemp, which also "hold" liquid better. Microfiber inserts will leak when full and compressed, so if the diaper reaches capacity and the baby's weight is on it, it leaks faster than cotton etc. Of course, natural fibers are much bulkier, so you need to physically be able to get the right amount of diaper+inserts under your diaper cover... not always possible for a heavy wetter!

2. Revisit the question as your child changes nighttime eating habits. Now at 13m, mine been more or less night-weaned for a couple of months, but if something changes and she doesn't get enough during the day, she'll go back to needing one feed during the night, and that makes the disposable necessary. The other night, when I knew she wouldn't need another feed, I tried a bamboo fitted diaper with an extra hemp insert (but on the outside, between the diaper and the cover = less bulky), and it was fine for the night! So we are not doomed to use disposables for the baby's whole "diapering lifetime" - we can continue doing what works FOR NOW, being happy to be using only one disposable per day, and maybe not even that if we re-evaluate once in a while.

3. No guilt anyway, obviously :) We're all doing our best.
 
#11 ·
No guilt!

I will add though, I have had HEAVY wetters, where disposables would never hold it all. I used doubled prefolds under a prorap pul cover or a fulled wool cover and that worked better than any sposie. I even have had friends that sposie during the day switch over to the prefolds at night because of leaks!
 
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