My partner and I have been cloth diapering our kid since they were 2 months old and they’re now nearly 3 years old and I sure have some stories and techniques to tell you on how we debugged the cause of cloth diaper leaks.
Since doing cloth diapers, there are a few hiccups we’ve come across when consistent leaks start happening.
Cloth Diaper Leak Caused by Butt Creams
The first time leaks were happening with the pocket diapers, it was because we were using creams, and washing them the normal way just wasn’t working. My partner, John, spent about 2 hours with a toothbrush scrubbing to get the creams off the inside of the covers. As you can imagine, using something like Desitin as a barrier to protect your little one’s skin from acidic piss also acts as a barrier on the diaper, so the pee is prevented from being absorbed into the insert as it should and it has to go somewhere.
To avoid the same fate as John, I recommend using diaper liners when using creams. This will help keep the creams from sticking and matting to the interior of the diaper or insert and maintain their absorbency.
You can also use the liners for poo if you want to make the more solid poops easier to remove, but we don’t. We have a sprayer attachment for the toilet that we use to spray them before sending them through the washer and dryer. Remember that babies who exclusively eat formula or chestmilk have water-soluble poo that is safe to put into a washing machine.
Cloth Diaper Leaks During Sleep
The second time leaks were happening was due to our kid just peeing A LOT and having some “big pees” as I called it. This started happening when they were 8 months old.
Turns out that our favorite insert, the charcoal bamboo, doesn’t hold as much as other types of inserts. There’s cotton, microfiber, and hemp to consider in addition to bamboo charcoal.
The Alva Baby pocket diapers default to come with microfiber, so to solve this “big pee” problem, we double up a charcoal bamboo insert with a microfiber insert, with the charcoal bamboo being closest to the body so it can quickly absorb, and then the microfiber can slowly absorb from that to help hold more.
This works fine during the day, but at night, they still just PEES SO MUCH. We’ve read a lot on what you can do, but we aren’t militant on using cloth only (keep in mind that we’re scrunchy parents, not crunchy ones), so we ultimately decided to get some nighttime disposable diapers which have been working for us. We only use one a day and the pack we get is like $23 for a pack of 80 and lasts us for over two months.
We briefly had to use disposables for nap-times as well because kiddo would have big pee’s during their 2-3 hour nap. We no longer use disposables during the day since our toddler doesn’t often nap anymore, let alone pees during naps. We only have disposable diapers for backups. The only disposable nappies we buy on the regular are the nighttime nappies.
Cloth Diapers Resources
Here is a list of shopping links and resources of stuff we used in our cloth diapering that I discussed above, so you can add these items to your baby shower registry.
- Cloth diaper liner on Amazon ($12.95) – we used these so infrequently, we never bought more than the first roll
- Huggies Overnight Disposable Diapers on Amazon – you can also get them from Target or Walmart
- Recommended Article: “Cloth Diapering – All About Cloth Diaper Inserts” by Vaishnavi R (Feb. 5, 2020) The Nestery.
- Types of cloth diapers we used
