We gave the cloth diapers a serious shot, but they failed to meet our expectations. Our honest bias was to use organic cotton reusable diapers. We paid a mint for them and paid for them again once we washed them and again when they failed. I’m not going to name any specific brands or paint all cloth diapers with that same brush. What I will do is provide our opinion on cloth, take it for what’s it’s worth!
In the early weeks your baby is likely to pee and poo fairly infrequently. However, in most cases your baby’s poo is going to be black and tarry. It’s pretty gross stuff and is from swallowing amniotic fluid in the womb. At this time, don’t use clothe because that stuff is nasty to wash out! In most cases, your clothe diapers probably wont fit anyway since your baby is going to be pretty small at this time.
Next, your baby will fall into a pretty regular albeit frequent schedule of peeing and then pooing once the feeding schedule gets going. Again, this stuff is going to be nasty and very much unlike adult poos, but luckily enough, not nearly as repulsive. We did okay at this time with our organic diapers, but did develop a smell in nasty smell in them after soaking them in water to try to get the stains out. We learned to never let diapers sit in water to soak! Rinse with a spray nozzle in a laundry tub and wring out until you are ready to wash. If you wait too long your diapers will start to mould. When you wash use hot water and powerful blaster to shoot the poo off. You can try to wash them in hot and 2 cold washes, but then you’ll get poo all in your washing machine. This brings me to my next point. It takes a lot of water to clean these things out. After you got some semi clean diapers, put them out on the line to bake in the sun and kill the bacteria and smell. If you can’t do this, consider not investing in diapers at all! Try baking the crap out of them in the dryer. This might have a decent result.
Once your baby turns 6 months and real foods come into play, watch out! Now your baby’s poos are going to get nasty. Have fun! Invest in a metal spoon (kitchen variety) and scoop the poo out into the trash before even trying to spray them off! If you are lucky, you’ll get some solid poos that tumble off into the toilet without help. Next, follow the 3 wash routine, cold, hot, cold or some variation. I was told not to wash in hot first – I’m not sure why.
After about a years worth of use, watch your organic cotton being to disintegrate and stretch so that poo leaks out the bottom. Besides this, they can’t hold nearly enough pee for a toddler and so expect your guy to wake up wet up to his chest! This is when we gave up and switched to disposables.
While we fully intended to stick to clothe, we couldn’t for sanitary reasons. At over $18 a pop, we probably lost money given the fact that we needed to wash them 3 times. We should also factor in the pain in the ass the diapers where to clean by hand – all that extra labour, their maintenance, not to mention the mess.
We did have one polyester brand cloth diaper and it seemed to hold up pretty good. I’m not sure how it would stand up to my son’s pees nearing two years, but I would consider given them a shot. I will say for certain that I wouldn’t bother with the organic cotton. While it’s nice to have something free of pesticides (so the company says), it’s not as if your child is going to be isolated from polyester for his entire life anyway. As they say, if you can’t beat’em, join ‘em!