The switch to cloth diapers!

I have never considered myself a "crunchy" momma.  

Sure I breastfed my girls.  

Sure I made my own baby food.

Sure I "wore" my girls (in a Moby wrap - LOVE!)

Sure I switched just about everything fresh from "conventional" to "organic".

But I never did feel "crunchy".

Until now. =)

Let me go backwards a bit....

When we finally got pregnant with the girls my mom encouraged us to cloth diaper them. She had cloth diapered all three of her children, and felt I should do the same.  I thought she was absolutely nuts! I quickly dismissed the idea. Cloth diapers?! Pins?! Plastic Pants?!  Too much laundry.  Too much grossness.  Too much headache.  No thank you!

Then a couple of months ago, the girls transitioned from size 4 to size 5 diapers.  No big deal right?

Wrong.

Several things had been going on over the last 6-9 months in the diaper industry and with diaper suppliers.  We had been using Pampers Sensitive Swaddlers since the girls were born.  Bri had very sensitive skin and would break out in an awful rash any time we tried to switch to any diaper other than the Sensitive Swaddlers.  We found that we could purchase these lovely diapers from Amazon Mom last year with a hefty "subscribe and save" discount, so they were actually significantly cheaper than most stores, and they were delivered to our door. Score!  

BUT.  Then it seemed Amazon Mom quit offering stellar deals on diapers, seemingly because they had acquired their competitor company, Diapers.com.  No need to offer stellar deals anymore, because they no longer had any real online competition.

Nearly concurrently, the price of Pampers in stores went up a minimum of $5 a box, across the board.  

AND, the girls went up from a size 4 diaper to a size 5 diaper. 

We switched to Huggies. Significantly cheaper, and the Little Movers were great!

And that worked, for a while.  Huggies didn't increase their prices on their boxes of diapers.  They still haven't. However, what those sly little buggers did was decrease the number of diapers provided in a box.  Where first we were getting 104 diapers, soon we were getting 88.  Now 78.  The price of the box has remained the same $30 as it was when there were 104 diapers in the package. And obviously you get less use out of a package of 78 diapers than you do out of a package of 104 diapers.

Our monthly diaper cost went from about $80 a month to about $120 a month.  And now we were looking at the cost of having yet another kiddo in diapers.  We figured that would be another $50 a month, easy. Making our monthly diaper total around $170. Oye.

So I went backwards.  

What about cloth diapers? I wondered.  They are so much better for the environment.  They could save us money in the long run.  Could we make it work?

After a MASSIVE amount of online research and reading tons of reviews and watching countless Youtube videos, we decided to make the switch.

The initial investment?  About $400.

$347 in one size fits all Bum Genius 4.0 pocket diapers - snap (26 in total - purchased on sale over the course of 2 weeks - buy 5 get one free promotion, plus two different get one free with $50 purchase promos)

$20 in special diaper detergent

$19 on a "wet bag" to put the diapers in

$10 on reusable wipes

We still need to get an actual cloth diaper pail (about $45) and a diaper pail liner ($16).  I didn't want to buy everything that was "suggested" right up front because, well, there has to be some suggestive selling with this stuff! I mean, do we really need 24 diapers per child at this point? Not likely. Do you really need the toilet sprayer?  I personally don't think so. But for future reference, do you really need a diaper pail and liner? Um, yes!

SO....

We have been using cloth diapers since Saturday.  

The verdict?

We have so much less trash, and smell, and mess! It's amazing!

I feel crunchy! LOL!

No, in all seriousness, it is much easier than I thought it would be.  There is definitely a learning curve (i.e. - what do I do with the poop?!), and you have to get into a wash routine that will work for you (the liners can be dried in the dryer, but the pocket diapers do best when line dried so you have to make sure you have enough clean at one time so you don't run out of diapers), but otherwise, it's cake! Seriously! And we are saving about $5 a day with just the girls by not having to buy disposables (I keep telling myself that - that's a smoothie a day at Starbucks!).  Sure, we still have a couple of boxes of disposables around, but we don't  need to use them at this point, so we aren't. =).  I feel so green!

And the girls like their new diapers too....here is Brianna, modeling her white Bumgenius 4.0 for you....=)

And both girls sitting, posing in their "Tutu cute" shirts and matching diapers...

The girls think they are pretty darn cool.  They like to run around without pants on now! And yes, I got colors other than white! Although I have to admit, most of what we got were gender neutral/boy because I intend to have the girls potty trained here in a couple of months, and then these lovely diapers will be used primarily for baby H! The girls always pick the pink, purple, red, and white diapers over the blue and green ones and want to wear those first...lol...such girly girls! They learn at a young age!

Here are the girls messing around in just their diapers =).  They love this!

So, that's been our biggest recent change!  We are still prepping everything for baby H's arrival...I think we have almost everything done...I  just have to be willing to give up my sleep now =).  I will be doing another post in a day or two with an update.  I am 38 weeks this week - less than 2 weeks to go! Eek!

Okay, that's all for now! Hope you all are well!!!

Until next time -

Megan