How many of you knew that I cloth diapered? (Henceforth to be referred to as CD, CDing, etc.) Well, I do. Except at night. But even that will be coming to an end soon. There's a lot of buzz right now surrounding cloth diapers, disposable diapers, which is easiest, which is cheaper, which is more environmentally friendly... etc. Gotta have something to argue about, right?
I chose to CD because for us, it's cheaper. Right now I'm just using your basic prefolds, liners, Snappis, and covers. Nothing fancy, heck, the prefolds are Gerber! At the time when I was buying the diaper covers, I felt like I was spending a lot of money. I really wasn't. Really. Diapers are cheap where I live. $10 for a pack of 40. (Okay, at least I think that's cheap...) We use disposable at night, so it normally takes us about a month to go through a pack, factoring in the occasional middle of the night leak. But if we were using solely these disposables, we'd go through approx. a pack a week. That adds up. All our ultilities are being paid for us this year, so all we have/had to pay for were the diapers (again, Gerber- $13 for 12, we bought 4 dozen, but are really only using 3, so 4x13=$52), covers ($100, I think...), Snappis ($4), liners ($30), and detergent (I don't know how it works out for the detergent). I'm not a math whiz, and I don't have my calculator open over here, but it looks to me like we spent less than $200 for start up, and are now just paying detergent costs. $200 would have bought us 20 weeks' worth of diapers. Max is now a year old, so you do the math. We saved a lot.
Yesterday I spent almost $300 on pocket diapers, inserts, and one PlanetWise wetbag. I will probably have to buy a few more in late June or early July before we head over to Korea, so I'm figuring on about $400 for diapers for soon to be two children. These should last us until Max is potty trained, and possibly even the new baby. I have no idea how much disposables cost in Korea. But I will be shocked if it worked out to be cheaper. Shocked.
Beyond the whole cost issue, there's the landfill thing... it takes possibly hundreds of years for a disposable to decompose. Now, you could use gDiapers, which are biodegradeable, but they're really expensive. Otherwise, all those diapers just sit. And sit. And sit. I read somewhere this morning that by the age of 2, a child has been changed approx. 13,000 times. That is a lot. of. diapers.
And the chemicals. I looked into that a bit, but really don't remember much besides the fact that I was grossed out by what was touching and leeching into my baby's bottom.
Anyway... I also hopping onto Etsy last night and typed in AIO cloth diapers. And, WOW! I found some AMAZING deals from sellers with stellar feedback!!
I think I've rambled long enough... and considering nobody is paying me to even type this post, no PR, no nothing... I'll leave you with the websites I use(d) for buying cloth diaper stuff. =)
Green Mountain Diapers
Nicki's Clearance
Nicki's Regular site
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