My partner and I became parents in 2018 and while we have a few ideas of how we’d like things to happen, we are pretty much flying by the seat of our pants, and apparently, this is called being “scrunchy.” Scrunchy is the grey area being being “crunchy” and “silky” and if you’ve never heard any of those terms before, you’re not alone because I vaguely heard of crunchy and had to look up the other two to write this article. In short, crunchy parents practice natural parenting (home births, exclusively breastfed, cloth diapers, etc.) and silky parents use modern techniques (hospital births, bottle/formula fed, disposable diapers, etc.). The scrunchy parents, like myself, do a little of both.
My partner and I have been doing cloth diapers for our baby now toddler. If you’re anything like me, I like low-effort chores, so while I wanted to save money and the environment, I also needed a system that was easy to maintain.
Cost Savings of Cloth Diapers
If you’re reading this article, I probably don’t have to remind you of the pros for being a cloth diaper family, but it still blows my mind how much money we’ve saved.
A pack of disposable diapers have about 40-60 and cost about $10-$30 depending on the brand. Since we changed our newborn roughly 9 times a day, that means a pack wouldn’t even last us a week in our house.
Of course, you can buy in bulk or larger pack sizes to save money and shop less often, but it’s still ridiculous compared to what we’ve saved and will continue to save because the cloth diapers we have will continue to fit our kid until they’re potty trained.
All Caregivers Need to Agree
The first piece of advice that I have is that if you’re parenting with another person(s), y’all need to be on the same page when choosing cloth diapers. If they’re not at least 50/50 towards making this happen and all the effort is placed on you to make it happen, it’s going to be so much more difficult to actually making it happen.
My partner was probably 20% interested in doing cloth diapers when I first brought it up and was about 55% into it by the time our kid was born. He’s now like 90% into it since we’ve been doing it because it’s saved us so much money. We’ve been doing cloth diapers since our kid was about 2 months old and they were being changed roughly an average of 9 times per day as an infant.
The Cloth Diapers We Used
Newborn & Infant
The reason why my partner and I started using cloth diapers when our kid was 2 months old is that they were so small as a newborn, they did not fit the smallest cloth diaper any sooner. So we used disposable newborn and size 1 diapers until our baby chunked up enough to fit into any cloth diapers without leaks.
In the beginning, we used the Thirsties brand where we had a waterproof cover paired with a prefolded insert that was basically a rectangular cloth that had to be folded in a certain way.
Throughout the day, we’d re-use the same cover and just switch out the soiled insert for a clean one. I think we changed the cover maybe 3-5 times a day, but her inserts would get changed about every 2 hours.
The important part to remember when using any kind of insert that doesn’t go into a pocket is to make sure the entire insert is contained inside the cover. Otherwise, it will be the source of a leak! It doesn’t have to be perfect either. After snapping the covers together, I just poked in what I saw and it worked just fine.
Baby
It was around 4 months old that our baby was big enough to comfortably fit into the Alva Baby one-size pocket diapers, so we retired our Thirsties covers and prefolded inserts and went full steam ahead with the pocket diapers and inserts, simply adjusting the snaps as kiddo grew. Our baby’s legs definitely got thicker sooner than their waist, so I often have to snap larger leg holes and a skinnier waist to ensure a snug fit, but all babies grow differently.
Depending on how cooperative kiddo is while being changed and the position they’re lying in are additional factors in how the buttons will snap—it’s not just their body size. Sometimes, I get one side in a snap closer to the middle than the other. As long as it’s snug enough to not leak or pinch, who cares if it’s symmetrical!
Toddler
Our little one is nearly 3 years old now and still in cloth diapers. With the way their toddler body developed, we now actually snap the leg holes smaller again because their toddler legs are less chunky than their baby legs. Their waist is roughly the same size, just a different shape as it’s becoming more pot-bellied and less overall baby-chub. It is perfectly normal for toddlers and preschool-aged kids to be pot-bellied as they usually change shape again, outgrowing their pot-bellies, between the ages of 3 and 6.
Potty Training
We are passively working on potty training. We have no intention of using disposable pull-ups. When our kid is ready, we’re just going to go straight from cloth diapers to underwear. I mean, there will probably be nakedness in between. Well, going commando might be a step before underwear. If you’re a small human whose learning to hold their bladder while also figuring out the motor skills to pulling their pants down, who wants to fumble around with two things?
Either way, we are not putting pressure on our toddler to potty train and we are privileged to have a daycare provider who is not pressuring our family either.
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.
- Thirsties Cloth Diaper Covers on Amazon
- Alva Baby One-Size Pocket Diapers on Amazon
- Alva Baby website – their website was annoyingly hard to use, but you can buy directly from them for specific designs if you don’t want to get packs from Amazon
- Mama Bear Disposable Diapers on Amazon – these are what we bought and used as an infant and we also keep disposables on hand in back-up or when travelling.
