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Friday, April 3, 2009

To Cloth Diaper or Not to Cloth Diaper?

As we've been getting things ready for baby #2, one question that's popped into our mind is: do we cloth diaper? Zosia was a cloth diaper baby for the first 9 months of her life, and as I mentioned here, I love a lot of things about cloth diapers. However, during our move, cloth diapering wasn't practical-- and Ben and I didn't feel comfortable imposing our cloth diapering on my parents' laundry machine when we were living there. Then, when we moved into this house, a combination of the fact that the laundry machine isn't very accessible plus the fact that it is totally on its last legs (and that Zosia didn't really fit into her diapers anymore, meaning that we would have to buy a new batch), made us decide to go with disposables. Now that she's an on-the-go toddler, I'm thankful for the increased mobility that disposables provide, and I've also found that she fits much more comfortably into baby clothes that are her size (those bulky cloth diapers add at least one, sometimes two sizes).

So, as you can tell, we're anything but legalistic when it comes to cloth diapers. I'm still debating whether and to what extent we'll use cloth diapers with #2. We have all of the supplies, so that makes things much easier. I think where I stand right now on the whole thing is that when we're at home, during the day, we'll use cloth-- and Ben has said he'd be happy to be in charge of washing them every couple of days (and my friend Carolyn who lives a couple of houses down also said we would be welcome to add them to her load of cloth diapers). But, if we're leaving the house, and also during the night, we'll use disposables (actually, even Zosia used disposables at night... mainly because we felt that we had to change cloth diapers, but one disposable usually made it through the whole night).

So, anyway, it looks like cloth diapers are back in our house... and I actually should probably start pulling everything out and getting it ready. For those of you who are interested about the details, I'll try to post about which diapers we use/ what process we use to make sure they stay clean in the next day or two (energy and time permitting)-- for the record, unlike what this picture suggests, there are absolutely no pins involved.

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