Last weekend marked a momentous occasion in our lives…buying
disposable diapers. You heard me
right. It was one of the first times we
have had to buy diapers for our 15-month old.
Crazy, I know! But we had the
good fortune of acquiring a LOT of diapers before little Huck was born because
of a diaper keg that was hosted for my husband.
And we finally made it through all of them. Oh we still have some random ½-opened
packages of diapers that the little guy grew out of before we could use; and of
course, I did exchange some smaller sizes for larger ones if he grew faster
than we could fit the diapers to him.
But I think there may have been only 2 other times when we actually had
to buy disposable diapers—once when he was still super small and once when we
were traveling and needed more. Oh yeah,
and we do buy overnight diapers since Huck sleeps 12-13 hours a night and needs
all the absorbency he can get. So the
diaper keg is the way to go if you know anyone having a baby in the near future.
If you’re not familiar with what I’m talking about, here’s
brief overview: it’s essentially a baby
shower for men. My husband’s friend got
a keg and a bunch of beer and invited their friends to come drink with them…the
catch, the fee for the beer was a package of diapers (we requested bigger sizes
since we had gotten smaller sizes at my baby showers). We have some very generous friends because many
of them brought big boxes of diapers…we’re talking the 196+ count diapers. If you’re reading this and contributed to the
cause, I can’t thank you enough; you helped us tremendously. If you consider that it costs roughly $72/month
(per babycenter.com) to use disposable diapers, that means we saved at least
$1,000 over the past 15 months. And for
those of you who know I am a Dave Ramsey nut, that completely gets me
psyched! But let me let you in on
another little secret as to how we made it this long without purchasing more
disposable diapers—some people might consider me a mild Granola/Earth Mama: I’d rather be outside doing anything active
than being inside, I’m {kind of} crazy about recycling, I care about our
environment & preserving it, we like to grow our own vegetables, we compost
nearly all of our organic non-protein food scraps to later feed our garden, and
WE CLOTH DIAPER.
It wasn’t until Huck man was about 11 months that I really
decided we would make a concentrated effort to go the cloth route. I had dabbled in it, but would get so
frustrated because the diapers always seemed to leak, and I wasn’t a huge fan
of rinsing messy diapers in the toilet even though I have a diaper sprayer (for
those of you who aren’t aware, a diaper sprayer is a spray nozzle that attaches
to the water line of your toilet and uses that water to rinse the diapers
directly into the toilet, safely disposing of the solid waste). But I started to realize that our diaper
supply was diminishing, and if I wanted to avoid the super high costs of buying
diapers each week or month, or however often you have to buy diapers (I don’t
really know, I guessJ),
then I better step up my game and dive into cloth diapering. I shared my frustrations with one of my
friends who is really into CD’s (cloth diapers) and she immediately added me to
this wonderful group on Facebook that changed my life (https://www.facebook.com/groups/FluffLoveCDScience/). The 2 biggest take-a-ways I got from this
group were how to properly position and fit the diapers to avoid leaks and how
to develop a sound wash routine…because, yes, washing cloth diapers does take a
little more science than simply filling the local landfill with disposable
diapers.
Don’t get me wrong, unfortunately, we still contribute our
share of diapers to the landfill, but it is certainly far less than the average
household, and even far less than what we were throwing out in the first 9-10
months of our child’s life. Before we
had a baby, we would maybe have 1 bag
of garbage a week (again, remember we compost and recycle everything!); after
we had a baby we would most typically have at least 2 bags of garbage, if not
more. But we are now back down to 1-1 ½ bags
of garbage for our little family of 3.
YEAAA!
We are a part-time cloth diapering family. There are times when I know it’s just going
to be easier to have a disposable on Huck like if we’re going to be out and
about, or when the sitter or my husband will most likely have to be the one to
deal with the messy diaper, or because I know a disposable will allow him to
sleep longer during nap time, but I try to use cloth as much as possible during
the day. It obviously saves us money and
contributes to our financial goals and helps save the environment, and the
diapers are also so darn cute, they’re hard to pass up!
Yes, cloth diapers are an expensive investment, but the fact
that you re-use them helps. And there is
a market out there for cloth diaper re-sale if they are in good enough
condition and if that is the route someone would want to take. I haven’t pumped a ton of money into
purchasing a bunch of CS’s; we have enough to last us 2-3 days before I have to wash them. The “nerd” in me says this is just fine and
there are other things I would rather save for.
For those of you who are questioning the use of the water
that it takes to launder dipes…guess what, over the past 4 months our water
bill has actually stayed the same or gone down. Yep, that’s right, DOWN!
I know I’m not normal, but at least I’m confident enough to
be content in being weird.
