Not your mother’s cloth diapers

Sorry we’ve been MIA from the blog lately. Childbirth classes, Christmas preparations and basketball games have kept us from making blog entries lately.

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We anticipate that we’ll be pretty traditional and conservative parents. But we didn’t really expect that we’d take a step back in time by considering cloth diapers for Cheeto.

After hearing great experiences from some of my online friends, I did some investigating and made the suggestion to Chris. At first, it took a little convincing to get him on board. He was expecting the cumbersome diapers and safety pins our mothers used. But after the thorough in-home demo from Toasty Baby and hearing the many advantages of cloth diapering, he agreed to give it a try. He couldn’t argue with these facts:

• An estimated 27.4 billion disposable diapers are consumed every year in the United States.
• A single disposable diaper may take 250 to 500 years to decompose.
• Disposable diaper use contributes to 1 ton of garbage per baby in landfills.
• Babies who are cloth diapered are potty trained on average in 24 months, versus 30 months for those who wear disposable diapers.
• On average, disposable diapers cost about $2,200 for 30 months while using prefold diapers and covers costs $735 for 24 months.

Thanks to Toasty Baby for this data.

So when Cheeto is about a week old, and after we get into a diapering routine, we’re going to move to cloth diapers. We plan to use prefold diapers

with covers,

plus a few all-in-ones when we’re out and about, away from home.

One way we plan to make this new adventure a little easier is by using Toasty Baby’s diaper service. Yes, it’s very much like the diaper service my mother used when I was a baby. Each week, Toasty Baby will drop off 100 prefold diapers and pick up the dirty ones. No laundering involved for us! This helped Chris ultimately decide to go with cloth diapers. :o)

So if you plan on babysitting Cheeto, expect to get a crash course in cloth diapering. Trust us…it’s not as difficult as you might expect!