I get nervous when talking to people I know in real life who do not cloth diaper about cloth diapering and they try to find excuses for why they don’t cloth diaper.  Most often I hear, “I would never have time for it.”

But really, what about cloth diapering takes more time than disposables?  Sure, there is more laundry.  But the laundry doesn’t take THAT much extra time and depending on how fancy your washer is, you could program in the cycles you want at bedtime and wake up in the morning to clean (albeit still wet) diapers.

Is it the actual diapering?  Yes, I tend to take a little more time when I’m putting a prefold on, but most of that is my fussiness.  I’ve found I can be as quick or as slow with a diaper change as I want to be.  With a pre-stuffed pocket diaper, changing is literally a breeze.  No slower than a disposable change, to be sure.

I guess my point here is: cloth diapering does NOT take more time than disposables.  Not like most disposable users would think.  And trust me when I say: If *I* can do it and say it’s no big deal?  THEN IT ISN’T.  Because I am NO Martha Stewart here.  My house is a wreck most of the time.  My laundry piles up as much as the next person’s does.  My dishes are legendary.  So I have to figure that if I can cloth diaper and consider it “no big deal”, then truly, ANYONE can do it.

Let’s make it clear.  Cloth diapering does NOT make me a “super woman”.  It certainly does not make me “better” than anyone who uses disposables.  I’m not the sort that thinks that anyone who hasn’t made the choices for her family that I’ve made for mine is somehow less than me.  I’m not going to lecture a disposable user or give dirty looks to a mom who uses formula either.  You put your baby in a crib in her own room from day one?  I’m more likely to look on in AWE than I am to judge you.

I’m not doing anything really all that special here.  Cloth diapering is becoming more and more mainstream but there is still a stigma attached to it.  I just want to get the message out there that, hey, it’s no big deal to cloth diaper.  It’s not harder, it doesn’t make me a better mom and it doesn’t require any special extra effort.  It just is what it is.  It’s a simple decision to just do it or not do it.

My goal, if anything, of this site is help some of you think, “Hey, maybe I can do it.”  Because you can.  I promise you can.

I have been having problems with The Stinkies.  It first started when my friend gave me 2 diapers with The Stink.  They infected my poor stash, and I totally re-did my wash routine, and now I can’t get rid of The Stinkies.  So I need help and advice.

My issue is that I live in a city with extremely hard water.  It’s so hard to get detergent out of stuff, and I don’t think that it even really suds properly.  My solution to that was to add powdered Calgon to our laundry.  I started this before we had an issue, adding a tablespoon to each load (we have a front washer), along with the detergent.  After we had noticed a problem, I started adding about a quarter cup to the wash, thinking that maybe it will help remove any mineral build up.    This?  Did nothing, and I was going through Calgon like a mad woman.

I also thought that it could be a bacteria thing, so I tried washing my diapers with Oxyclean as well.  The first time I tried it, I added a full scoop of Oxyclean, and then rinsed eleventy million times.  Just in case.  That didn’t seem to fix the problem.

I had heard about the mysterious powers of blue Dawn, so I picked some of that up, and put it in the wash.  It made a lot (A LOT) of bubbles, but no help with The Stinkies (although I used it straight on my pockets, and they haven’t had a smell issue since, so I guess it kind of helped).  I haven’t been adding it to the wash regularily, so maybe that’s something to try.

I have even been hanging things out in the sun, even though you cannot convince me that this will help.  There’s no way that the sun can kill bacteria, otherwise we would live in a sterile world.  I do believe that it will bleach out stains, and the fresh air can’t hurt the fabric, but I didn’t have high hopes for this curing my diaper plague.

My last idea was that maybe I need to switch detergents.  There’s a lady on the Diaper Swappers board who lives in my city, and she has great results with Sunlight brand laundry detergent.  I might try this, once my Nellie’s Washing Soda is all gone (I spent money on it, I should use it!).  I’m fairly skeptical that a change in detergent will fix all my diaper woes, just because Nellie’s among the top recommended for diaper care.  Oh well.

Any advice?  Things I didn’t try?  Things I should think about?  I don’t have access to RLR (unless one of my friends in the States wants to donate to my cause - and even then I’m petrified to use it in my front loader!), so that’s the only thing I’m not willing to try (that and boiling my PUL - that also scares the poop out of me).

I love summer.  It’s warm, the sun is out, and we get to wear shorts and tank tops (for those of us who dare to).  Summer also means that we can finally strip the layers off our babies and let them run “free”.  For those of us who invest in cute diapers, we get doubly excited because we can finally see what our hard-earned cash has bought us.

Personally, I love to see Kitten run around in her little Piddle Poddles and her new Mutt*.  I do love to see her little tushie in just about every diaper we own, but those two get the biggest thrill out of me.  I am a little nutty, so I tend to make sure that she has co-ordinating shirts so she’s wearing an “outfit”.  But maybe that’s just me.

I also love summer cloth diapers because my diapers dry SO much faster outside.**  They’re pretty crunchy when they come in, but a quick tumble in the dryer softens them up.  I also like that the sun bleaches my inserts and the diapers.  And why do I love the sun so much for it’s bleaching powers?  Because no one told me about “summer poo”.  I don’t know if Kitten just isn’t adjusting well to the heat, but her diapers are a lot mushier and harder to clean out than they used to be!  I used to be able to just roll that sucker out into the toilet, but we’re back to elbows in the toilet scrubbing out poo.  ::sigh::  I meant to buy a diaper sprayer, but still haven’t got there, so I guess that’s my own fault.  So we’ve had our first (and second, but on the same diaper) stain ever.  Every day I throw this diaper out in the sun, and every day it looks a little better, but I’ll be glad when this heat breaks and Kitten’s digestion goes back to normal.

It’s my own fault, really.  If I wasn’t so darn proud of my stain-free diaper stash, it wouldn’t be a big deal.  But no.  It’s a giant big deal!  The diaper that is stained is my Mother-Ease One Size - not my favourite diaper, and even if I sold it, I don’t think that I would get much for it.  But the stain just sits there and mocks me.  Maybe this is just God’s way of telling me to be a little more humble?  It sure seems like it.

*We accidentally bought a Mutt (don’t ask me how).  It’s a medium front-snapping one, I don’t know anything else about it, other than it’s yellow with blue and burgundy flowers with a blue velour inside.  I will say this - it stretches like no tomorrow, and it’s unbelievably absorbent.  I swear that it sucked up more than half the toilet water.  What was it doing in the toilet?  Oh, Kitten had a GIANT POO in it not 15 minutes after I put it on her, and I didn’t want it to stain.  Luckily, crisis was averted, and it did not stain.  It might even be beating out the Piddle Poddles for my favourite, except that we get wing-droop with it that we don’t get with the Piddle Poddles.

** I use a drying rack to dry our clothes, not a line.  It was taking everything a really long time to dry because everything was folded over the bar in half, rather than being hung with pins.  I went and bought 50 pins for $1 (you should be so proud!), and now I’ve hung everything up with pins and boy howdy does it dry faster!  I seriously recommend this to people who use a drying rack.  Plus, when the wind comes up you aren’t chasing your underwear down the street!

I would probably hesitate to say that cloth diapers are ENTIRELY leak-proof.  I mean, I doubt anything is leak-proof, if you want to get right down to it.  Plus, if you leave a diaper on long enough, it doesn’t matter what the heck it is made of or how many gussets it has.  It will leak.  That’s just physics, yo.

But in the couple months (has it only been that long) that I’ve been using cloth diapers, I’ve noticed one giant benefit:  There have been virtually NO LEAKS.

There’s been the odd leak here and there.  Mostly urine and mostly when she’s wearing a prefold trifolded into a prorap cover.  And most of those leaks have been fairly recently, as she’s been outgrowing her prefolds and covers at an alarming rate (hello, chunky baby!).  She pretty much NEVER has a leak while wearing her pocket diapers (right now: BumGenius and Rumparooz).

But I’m leaving out the most important aspect of all of this: NO POOP EXPLOSIONS!  Now, Evie only wore disposables for the first six weeks or so of her life.  But in that time, we learned that with her rather infrequent pooping schedule, poop explosions were pretty much unavoidable.  She would output a day’s worth of… poop and well, no disposable known to man could possibly contain it all.  Truthfully, I wondered at the time if any cloth diaper could contain it as well.

The prefolds in the cover are pretty good, to be honest.  We might get a little seepage around the legs, but nothing shooting up the back our out the front or sides so far.  The BumGenius just laugh at the audacity of this poop that would like to explode out.  “Not so fast,” they say.  And the Rumparooz double leg gussets have never failed to contain whatever is tossed their way.  Ever.

Now, there are some extenuating circumstances here.  I am pretty quick on the diaper changes, something that I’ve gotten even better at since she’s been in cloth.  I find I’m a lot more attuned to such things now.  Also, her poop has not met the worthy adversary that is the exersaucer.  If anything can compress a diaper, it’s an exersaucer.

But in the meantime, I’m pretty impressed.  This is something I wasn’t expecting from cloth diapers.  Not that I’m complaining, mind you.  But definitely a fantastic side benefit to cloth diapering.

Is my experience a common one?  Or am I just lucky?

I didn’t consider using cloth because I had a strong conviction about all the diapers in the landfill, nor because I thought that the possible health consequences of disposables, but because my neighbor (we had just become friends) used them, and I wanted her to like me.  Truthfully, right around that time, I was starting to be interested in being environmentally conscious, but the deciding factor wasn’t that - it was that L and I would have just a little more in common.

My husband is a rather frugal guy.  He’s starting to wear off on me, and I’m starting to be able to admit that I will try anything for about two weeks… but I will usually quit after that amount of time.  So when I said that I wanted to try cloth diapering, he pretty much told me that it wasn’t going to happen.  He thought that we would spend a lot of money, and I would quit far before we got our money’s worth.  We had an agreement - L would lend me 6 Indian Cotton prefolds, and I would buy 2 covers and 6 fleece liners.  We spent as much on the covers and fleece (and shipping!  Oy vey!) as we would have spent on a box of diapers so we had to cloth diaper as long as that box would have lasted - one month.  And by we, I mean me, because lets face it - Rob is NOT a fan of prefolds.

So we started with my itty bitty stash.  It grew quite quickly, considering that was back in April.  Two months later, we have a considerable stash going on.  We still use the 6 prefolds (most of them have been embellished by me now), 4 covers, 5 pocket diapers, 1 AIO, 3 fitted diapers, and 1 fleece soaker.  I also have 3 more fitted diapers on the way to me, and we’re now branching out into cloth wipes!

My friendship with L has grown quite a bit as well.  It’s not all about the diapers for us, but being able to identify with each other with the highs and lows of cloth is definitely a plus.