How Do I Do It: Part 2- The Cloth Diaper Saga
If you missed Part one of the series, you can read about it here:
I left off the story as we were living off a small income and needing to save money. We had 1 child and with diapers and everything we were spending a fortune. I realized at this point that If we weren’t careful we were going to have nothing left. So I started looking into frugal living and what I could do to bring the spending closer to equaling the income.
The first thing I found was cloth diapering. This took a bit of work, money and convincing my husband that it isn’t as bad as he things to deal with cloth diapers. Many people who I have talked to about using cloth to save some money ask me how I convinced him. It really wasn’t hard, I told him he could do whatever he wanted, I was going to use cloth and when the disposables were gone, I wasn’t buying anymore. If he wanted to use disposables, then he would have to go buy more. He used up the disposables and learned to use cloth diapers. We were exclusively using cloth for a while until we found cheap ways to get diapers.
Cloth diapers are not as hard and complicated as people think. They have come a LONG way in the last few years and other then having to rinse them off and washed, they can be as easy as disposables. Here are some links to the different types of diapers that are cloth that you can look at.
Everything you wanted to know about different cloth diapers.
I currently use a combination of prefolds and snappis with covers and one-size pocket diapers. Then when out of the house and at night we use disposables bought with a coupon for $4 or less. This saves us a fortune!!! We spent probably close to $200 total on the cloth diapers when we were first getting them. We have a set big enough to diaper 2 kids full time from birth to potty training. So you could easily get them for cheap for 1 kid. probably as much as you spend on diapers in a month or so without coupons.
If you are interested in trying them out but don’t want a huge cost up front a great place to go is Diaper Swappers. It is a buy and sell type place for cloth diapers. You can get used ones to try out and find what you like and then sell the ones you don’t like and get money to buy what works. Each person will have a different combo that will work for them. We had to use cloth exclusively with my second baby because of sensitive skin. We did that until she was 6 months when we found a disposable that worked for her. That is how we found the combo we have now and love!!!
More to come…
Do you use cloth diapers or are you interested in trying them out?? I would love to hear your comments or questions!
When we made the switch to cloth we started out using loaners from someone until we could get our own. We really liked the pocket diaper because they were the most daddy friendly. I did a lot of research and found that I could actually make them for much cheaper then buying the seconds. That goes for the prefolds too. If you check out verybaby.com, there are all kinds of tutorials, patterns and the best prices on the materials needed to make your own cloth diapers. By making our own I was able to get more then double the amount then if I had just simply bought them. It’s a little more work because you actually have to sew them, but for us it has been well worth the money we saved.