Cloth Diapering 101

After some research I decided for health, financial and earth loving reasons, cloth diapering made sense for our family.  This pass weekend we went ahead and started Mr. Little Man on cloth diapers.   We are transitioning slowly though to make sure the hubby and I can get acquainted with the ins and outs of cloth diapering.  We are still using disposable wipes and we have disposable diapers on us when we are out, plus we are still using nighttime disposable diapers.  Baby steps.

The first step in starting to cloth diaper is deciding what kind of cloth diapers you want.  There are so many out there and it can get overwhelming-at least for me it did.  Prefolds, pockets, all in one (AIO), all in two (AI2), and the list goes on.   Check out this Youtube's 'Different Types of Cloth Diapers' video.  It was the most straight forward video that helped introduce me to the heap of cloth diapers available.  I  choose to start with prefolds for a couple of reasons.  First, I didn't want to spend too much money incase it didn't work out for us.  And secondly from what I understood they are the easiest CD's to clean due to the fact that they are not sewn to anything, so you can take everything apart and wash separately.

I had four boiling in the big bot and two in the smaller one.

At this point I have only dealt with prefolds so if you are interested in how to start using prefolds, than read on.  Once you order your CD's you have to get them prepped before use.  Most blogs I've read said doing five cycles of wash and drying, but who has time for that!?  Than I found out you can actually boil them which is what I did.  I boiled them for 30 minutes and than I took them through a rinse cycle, dried them and than washed them on sanitize (whitest whites).  I dried them one more time and they were ready to go!  Here are the pictures:

I made sure they stayed under the boiling water.  I added more water if I thought it was necessary.

They will be HOT.  So I used thongs to remove them from the pot.

I put them in a big bowl until they were ready to go in the washer.

Can you see the difference!?  And I'm actually missing two on the left side!

They also shrink since they are cotton.

And now for the real test.

So far so good!

Here are the items I purchased to start cloth diapering.  Two Thirsties Covers, doublers to increase the absorption during nap times.  Disposable liners to catch poop and flush away, snappies to hold diaper in place and safety pins which I have yet to use and I probably won't because my baby is too wiggly.  I also purchased Bac-Out (not in the picture) to spray on poopie diapers for easy cleaning.  And of course you also need your prefolds.  I purchased them at Greenmountain.com.  Everywhere I looked they had great reviews.  Since I was already going to be saving money from cloth diapering I didn't want to be a cheapo with this part of my purchase and buy Gerber prefolds or something along those lines.   I really like these cloth-eez prefolds from Green Mountain because I don't have to fold them in-they are the perfect fit!   

Check out diaperpin.com it tells you what is on sell at different cloth diapering sites!  I was able to save a few bucks on my covers.  

sorry it's backwards

Well there you have it folks, I have taken the plunge into cloth diapering.  Hopefully this information will help someone looking into cloth diapering as much as it helped me!