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Cloth Diapering, cloth diapers, easy cloth diapers, environmentally friendly, green, healthy baby options, Using cloth diapers, why cloth diapers
This may or may not come as a surprise to you, but I love cloth diapers. I don’t just own a business that sells them to make money. I own the business I do, because I really do love cloth diapers. To me, cloth diapering is one of the best kept secrets. Of course, not all people, yes even my friends and family members, do not share my enthusiasm for cloth diapers. Some are even completely turned off by them thinking they are gross, hard to use and very time consuming. Not only that, but it’s something that tree huggers and flower people do.
Well, let’s talk about the non-tree hugging stuff for a moment. First, I want to talk about why I love cloth diapers. Besides the fact that they are super cute, they are actually really easy to use. I only wash our diapers every 4-5 days. This really hasn’t added any noticeable work to all the laundry I feel like we as a family are doing already. So that’s easy. What about poop you say? Many people picture cloth diaper using parents as hanging over a toilet dunking poopy diapers in it and swishing them around. Geez, really?! I have never done this. This sounds horrible to me! For the first 6 months (before baby starts eating solids), you only need to change the diaper and store it in a dry, yes even cute, wet bag. No swishing and absolutely no buckets of soaking poopy diapers either!
After the baby starts solids, they make these awesome toilet paper thin liners that you can put on top of your diapers, then when the baby poops, you just remove the liner and flush it and the poop down the toilet. EASY! The last part I love about cloth diapers…fewer leaks than disposables! There’s a myth going around that cloth diapers leak all the time and that you need to use disposables when you go out of the house. The truth is that when you are using great cloth diapers, that fit well on your baby, and are washed correctly, they do leak less than disposables. The main reason why they leak less is because you can get a much better fit with cloth diapers. They have nice fitting elastic around the legs and back to help prevent blow outs and the cloth absorbs faster than the chemical absorption used in disposables. Awesome right?!
The #1 reason most people start using cloth, MONEY! That tug at my pocket book is what motivated this frugal mama to cloth diaper. Using cloth has been a huge money saver for us. Over the last 5 1/2 years (2 kids fully diapered and 1 5 month old still in diapers) we have spent only about $600 for cloth diapers. WOW! On average disposable diapers cost about $70 a month, which means I have saved $4,550. Every time I add this up I am shocked that the diapers I love have saved me this much money, because really, now I would do it even if they were just as expensive as disposables.
Now, as far as trees go, what’s so bad about hugging them? I mean they are wonderful and we need them. I’m not even sure when the concept of choosing to do what’s best for the planet became a negative. After all, that’s where we live! I personally feel like, even with recycling and composting, I throw away too much. That stuff has to go somewhere. At least with using cloth diapers, I can keep at least one full bag of poopy diapers out of the landfill each week. After two and a half years of using disposable diapers, that adds up to about 120 BAGS! Then, times that by 3 kids, that’s a whopping 360 bags that take 200-500 years to decompose. Can you imagine your great great great grand kids being able to see the poopy diapers you wore as a baby? Eew.
I could go on with more environmental benefits and health benefits, but my point is not to bore you nor to make anyone feel guilty. My point is to share my love of cloth diapers with you, to give you just a snap shot of the benefits and how easy it can be, in hopes that more people will give it a try. It is defiantly worth a try!
Need a little more incentive to take the leap? We are running a campaign for cloth over the next several weeks where anyone who joins the campaign can win some free diapers. Check out our campaign details HERE! Anyone can join the campaign, even if you don’t use cloth, but if you do use cloth and you blog about it and share the campaign, you can also be entered to win a $50 Gift Certificate to Little Neetchers!
Join the campaign and help other fall in love with Cloth diapers!