Cloth diapers

Bed rest has given me some time to readdress our decision to do cloth diapers with the girls. We decided a while back we were going to do it and then I kind of stopped thinking about it with all we have had going on the last several months. But now I have nothing going on and figured I would be a little more productive while on bedrest and give The Office re-runs a rest for a while! :)

So not that anyone probably cares too much...but hey, why not blog about it right?

I have been crunching numbers and doing budgets for months now looking to see where we can cut costs. I hope to only work 2 days a week and am motivated to really do my best to make our money stretch as far as possible. From a financial standpoint I found that most people spend about $800 on diapers in the first year of their child's life, which would equal $1600 for us....woah! Add in our little Jane in the next few months and well you can do the math, lots of money of little booties! :)

After reading about lots of different diapers it looks like the only thing that would really be a change for us is that some parts of the diapers need to be hung to dry. I am not a hang dry kind of person. It all just goes in at once. However, luckily I married a man that seems to have an odd love for laundry so I think figuring out the whole line drying thing will be a perfect job for him.

Anyway, from what I can tell there are newborn cloth diapers and then one size adjustable cloth diapers that will last your child throughout the entire time they are in diapers. We have decided to skip the newborn cloth diapers and do disposable. It's looking like our girls are going to be preemie anyway and I didn't want the added expense of getting tiny diapers that would hardly be used and I didn't want them in cloth diapers in that super newborn phase when they poop a million time a day. So our plan is to implement the cloth diapers around 3 months or so. I'm also planning to mainly use cloth when we are at home. I don't think I am going to take wet bags on play dates or road trips and stuff. I think I will also use normal wipes. So I guess we will be a hybrid cloth diaper family. :) However, my plan is to use them at all times if we are at home or just on short errands. The more I read the easier it looks. You just stick in the insert, dump out the poop and wash. There is special detergent and I figure we would just do a few extra loads of laundry a week for diapers. To me a few extra loads is worth it if it gets me more hours at home with the girls! Over $6000 saved on diapers over the course of having 3 in diapers for 2-3 years is motivation enough for me!

Ill post again once we get going on this and let you know how we are doing. However, I think it will be ok! Oh, and the ones I am getting are called Bum Genius. I have heard great things! If you are reading this and do cloth diapers please feel free to comment! I would love any advice! :)