My daughter is now 3 ½ which means it's been 1 ½ years since I've changed a diaper. I have to admit, I miss it, especially when I see things about the Great Cloth Diaper Change or Dirty Diaper Laundry's Flats and Handwashing Challenge going on. This spring marks the second that I won't be participating in any fun cloth diaper challenges, but I am definitely looking forward to experiencing them all again with a little boy this time next year.

My daughter was cloth diapered for two years before she potty trained. Even though my cloth diaper stash ended at a grand total of I-lost-count-at-60, this meant a lot of wear and tear on many of the diapers.

Cloth diapers, particularly modern cloth diapers, are often thought of as expensive and requiring the use of laundry facilities. Low income families frequently won't even entertain the idea of using it because of limited income and washing access.

Diapering couldn't get any greener than using cloth diapers when you factor in that cloth can be bought and re-sold, gently used, further reducing the cost and often recouping most of your investment.  However, there are some really important things to consider when you buy or sell used cloth diapers, specifically when you're on the receiving end of the deal.

There is an African song/saying that says, “It takes a whole village to raise a child.”  I don’t think that phrase applies only to Africa, it seems to take on its own meaning here in the States too.  I feel that when it comes to getting all the things that we need for our babies,  the communities we live in really chip in.  I’ve heard things like, “Don’t buy baby clothes, I have a ton that my little one has outgrown.” Or “Wait, before you buy a crib and come check mine out first.  We’re not going to have any more children so we don’t need it.

The things that we don’t get as hand-me-downs often come in the form of shower gifts.  The idea is that the expectant couple need not buy a thing thanks to their family, church, and friends helping out.  What’s best is not the gifts you get, but the experience that comes with them.  “Becca, I got you this placemat because it’s wonderful for going to restaurants.  Sticks right to the table, can’t be thrown around the room and it wipes off!”  I would have never thought of that.  Or, “You won’t need them yet, but my daughter loved these sippy cups.  Maybe you’ll find them useful when your daughter is a toddler.”   Whether things are given to us to keep, or passed back and forth between families, it’s really nice to have that financial support when it comes to getting the things our children need.  So, I thought, “Why not do this with cloth diapers?”  Why not practice the hand-me-down and pass around tactics we use with other baby items

And so it ends.  I’ve just put my daughter in her last mandatory flat diaper and put her to sleep and I’m more relieved than I can say.  I’ve discovered many positive things about using flat diapers, but with the list of pros come some cons as well so it’s nice to know that I now have the option to use whichever type of diaper I want as each individual situation dictates.   But before I go into that, let me tell you about the final day.

Saturday morning, my daughter had the greenest poop I’d ever seen! It was so green I called my mom and my husband to come look at it as I asked them if maybe she’d ingested a crayon or something.  Seriously, it was THAT green.  Meanwhile, my little girl loved all the attention and just sat there on the changing table looking from one loving caregiver to another smiling widely.  It makes me wonder if she might just produce green poop again just to get our attention!  When I was washing it off, the fold sort of fell apart as I tried to hold all the corners and dunk the diaper without touching too much of the stuff…which brings me to the point of this story—I dislike cleaning poop off of flats or any other diapers with lots of creases where poop can hide.  But I got it off.  I think I got more of the poop off the diaper by dunking it than I would have with a diaper sprayer, actually.  Of course, my hands did became more submerged.

Friday went much better than Thursday. It was calm, and there was no drama. Even though I have enough diapers that it wasnt necessary, I washed the diapers quickly while Bunny napped and then line dried them under the sun where they dried much more quickly than they would have inside. In fact, they dried in three hours that way. I hope its sunny during the rest of the week!

So, I have this problem and its called obsessive cloth diapering. Many of you probably know it all too well. You see that fluffy piece of cloth diaper goodness on your computer screen and you must have it because its different from any other piece of fluff you have! And besides, even though your stash is overflowing to the extent that it can no longer be contained in your dresser, shelf, or basket, you need it. I admit to having this problem. However, Im also quite stingy so I generally drool over the fluff without buying because my baskets are so overflowing that they are literally bursting at their corn husk seams. So, if I MUST have it, I find ways of getting it for free or ridiculously cheap by either finding a knock-your-socks-off-deal, making it myself, or doing a trade with a WAHM. But when I cant make it or find it for free, I will buy it if Ive convinced myself I need it. Thats how I had full stashes of flats, prefolds, fitteds, and pocket diapers.

Lately the world wide web and especially cloth diapering communities have been buzzing around recent news articles bringing to light the fact that low-income families are having trouble affording diapers.  Not only are they having trouble simply affording them, they're resorting to attempting to reuse soiled disposable diapers and/or knowingly leaving them on their babies for as long as possible in order to try and stretch the amount of use they can get out of a package of diapers.

When we were pregnant, we had registered for a Diaper Genie and it was one of the first gifts we’d received. It got steady use for about three weeks with diapers and then we had about 11 cloth diapers, which with obsessive washing, I was able to turn into an almost full-time stash.

But we kept the Diaper Genie. Why, you ask? Because we were still using disposable wipes.

When I started cloth diapering, I didn’t have enough money to buy all my diapers at once.  I had to save the money and add to my stash quite gradually.  Because my focus at the time was simply getting enough diapers to last my daughter between washes, I didn’t even think about cloth diapering accessories for a long time.  As you can guess, my dirty diaper storage was interesting, at best.

Can you believe that Christmas is almost here? Black Friday ads everywhere announce it proudly and Christmas trees were up in chain stores before the Halloween costumes had even been removed. Soon, the throngs of happy—or maybe just stressed—people will fill the stores and jam-pack the lines with baskets full of gifts for everyone they know. They will buy things they don’t need (and some that they do) and most of them won’t give a second thought to the environment or to their friends’ and families’ wallets. Of course, with the recession, many of us have managed to protect our own wallets by tightening our Christmas belts, doing things such as shortening our gift list, minimizing our spending limits, or even hand making our gifts.

We started cloth diapering our first son when he was about 9 months old and we had just discovered we were expecting #2.

We've now been using cloth for a little over two years and haven't looked back! Now that we are now expecting #3 we can watch our savings grow, as well as see how much waste we are not generating!

Why are there so many options? I, of all people, know how hard it is to buy cloth diapers in exclusively unisex colors. I have a daughter and have been sucked into buying the cute girly colors and patterns. My husband and I do want to have more children, so what if our next baby is a little boy? Will we put girly patterns on him? Could we afford to buy a whole new boy stash?

With the economy as it is many families are looking for cheaper cloth diapering methods, but want something with the simplicity of All In One Diapers. Easy enough! You can create this same level of simplicity with just a bit of post-laundry preparation with simple prefold diapers and cloth diaper wraps.

Recently we posted about fitted cloth diapers, most specifically, the Kissaluvs Fitted Cloth Diapers, an absorbent, plush, fitted diaper made from durable cotton fleece.