Cloth diapers now come in all sorts of colors, patterns, and a dazzling variety of breeds.  There’s all-in-ones, all-in-twos, hybrids, fitted, contoured, flats, etc.  You can buy your own cloth diapers and wash them yourself, or you can get a service that comes to pick up the dirty diapers once a week and brings you a fresh supply.  The possibilities are endless.  I’m not getting into all the different kinds of cloth diapers; there are a ton of good articles on the internet and YouTube videos on this topic.

When I was pregnant with Joshua, we decided to go with the Grovia cloth diapers for him.  I chose Grovia mainly because I just HAD to have organic cotton on my precious first born’s butt.  I posted about it a few months before Joshua was born.  I know in my original post I wrote about how disposable diapers are really bad for the environment.  Now looking back at that post, I sound like this totally naive and judgemental first-time mom.  The truth is, after 20 months of diapering a kid, my conclusion is that you have to do what works for you.

I wasn’t sure what we’ll end up doing at that time, but here’s an update 20 months later.  We mainly use cloth diapers during the day.  But at night when he sleeps 10 hours, we use disposable diapers because they do hold more liquid.  We also use disposables when we’re traveling.

Cloth diapers work for us, because Joshua is not in a daycare (daycares won’t cloth-diaper your kid), we have in-suite washer/dryer, and he doesn’t get a bad reaction with cloth diapers like some kids can.  But disposables also work for us because it means I don’t have to worry about a leaky diaper when Joshua is having a long sleep.

Here’s Joshua in his cloth diaper at 2 months of age:

By the time Savanna comes, Joshua will still be in diapers so we couldn’t just pass on Joshua’s cloth diapers to Savanna.  I ended up just ordering a batch of new cloth diapers for Savanna.  The ones I ordered for Savanna is a brand called Sweet Pea.  They are made in Canada, and they receive fairly good reviews from consumers.  Diaperpin.com is a really good source of cloth diaper related consumer reviews.

You can see Joshua trying to swipe one of the diapers in the last picture while I was taking photos of them.

I love the owl print ones from Sweet Pea; they are so cute!

I get a lot of the same questions about cloth diapering.  I’ll end the post with a quick summary of my most frequent answers:

1. No, it’s not that difficult to clean a poopy diaper when you use a flushable liner.  You pick up the liner with the solid mess, and flush the whole thing away.  The dirty cloth diaper goes into the laundry pail.

2. We couldn’t find a diaper service that supplied organic diapers, that’s why we chose to buy our own and wash them ourselves.

3. I find with a newborn, you do so much laundry anyway (clothes are easily soiled with spit-ups and poop multiple times a day), so adding some cloth diapers doesn’t really add much to the laundry you have to do.  Once I got into the rhythm of it, it really isn’t that big a deal.

4. We use Tiny Bubbles detergent to wash Joshua’s clothes and diapers.  You can get them from CostCo.ca.

5. No, we don’t use cloth diapers when we travel, because we don’t have convenient access to washer/dryer.

6. Over time, yes, it is cheaper to use cloth diapers.  The initial purchase can be pricy, but you can get hundreds of use out of each cloth diaper.