On the matter of diapers
Before our first child was born, Szuyin and I agreed that we would like to go with reusable diapers. And that right there tells you everything you need to know about the decision: it was not based on practical concerns, but it did make us feel good. That is a recipe for a regrettable decision.
We have been in the business of changing diapers for over a year now, and… we’re sticking with the reusables as much as we can. Things have settled into a nice, workable routine, with disposables bailing us out of some tough situations.
In this post, I hope to document what we’ve done, what we’re still doing, and what we might change. It’s probably going to be a bit haphazard.
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How our diapering system works
Yes, that’s right: it’s a diapering system.
My initial thought was that, by choosing cloth diapers, we’d be wrapping our baby’s butt in, y’know, a cloth, and then fastening it with safety pins. I guess? That was my understanding of how my mom kept me from crapping all over the house, so I figured that was what we’d be in for.
But (thankfully) some new options have come onto the scene in the three decades since I stopped wearing diapers. I will now attempt to summarize.
Shells + Inserts
Instead of big ol’ squares of cloth that you have to origami into a diaper, we just have semi-waterproof “shells” that have pockets for you to insert absorptive cloth.
We got ours from kaleimamo.com and I really like the shells. I think they look great and I get to feel like we’re in a little club with the other babies we see wearing them around town.
The inserts are letting me down a little bit. I should have anticipated that there would be some wear and tear, but some of our original cloth inserts are in a really sad state, and I’ve had to replace them.
Under managed conditions, these diapers do the job very well. (That is, with frequent checks and changes.)
Top shelf: spray bottle and reusable wipes, but also some "real" wipes for when things get serious. Bottom shelf: nicely folded row of reusable diapers (and also some Huggies).
These diapers work very much like disposables. The only difference is what you do with the dirty ones you take off the baby. We have an Ubbi diaper pail next to our changing table, and that’s where the reusable diapers hang out until laundry, instead of throwing them out.
But do they get the job done?
Yeah, totally. The only time she pees on the floor is when she’s naked. Success!
But around eight months in, I’d say we started seeing some significant leakage. I’m gonna blame Toby’s thighs for not being thicc enough to plug up the openings. Some nights, we would need to change PJs and sleepsack every time she woke up to feed. That was not fun.
We now put her in a disposable diaper every night, and for her once-daily nap. We just couldn’t expect a dry baby with the reusables.
Poop is icky.
Yes.
Fully breastfed babies produce “water soluble” waste, a fact which is severely underrated, in my opinion. This was a very simple stage: remove diaper, put into diaper pail, wash.
Nowadays, we have to dump the waste into the toilet and rinse the shell before we can stash it until laundry time. During this stage, I have learned quite a bit about how much actual human waste I’m willing to deal with before I'll change my mind about an illogical decision.
Is it more or less expensive?
Time for some lazy math! The short story is: there’s a chance we’re coming out ahead on lifetime costs.
To get the sticker shock out of the way: we’re in for $720 on reusable diapers. (There are some accessories, some items surrounding the reusable diapers, that I’m not accounting for because I don’t know what their replacements would’ve been, or if maybe we would have gotten them anyway.)
I think we can figure seven diapers per day on average, for this exercise. (Who the hell knows? It’s a blur.) We got some Honest disposables in Toby’s first month of life, which come in at about 45 cents per diaper from Target. Kirkland from Costco is closer to 20 cents. We mostly supplement with Huggies nowadays, which are somewhere in between those two.
So, our $720 on reusables would have gotten us between 228 and 514 days on disposables. Which is either eight months or 17 months. So, we broke even months ago or we have a ways to go still. (I never promised a clear answer.)
Of course, that doesn’t tell the whole story. We have costs associated with doing the laundry much more frequently. I have no way to compare water consumption. Almost all of our electricity comes from solar panels now, so that’s nice, but it also complicates the calculation. And I suppose my time must be worth some dollar amount.
So… whatever. The numbers aren’t very compelling on their own. We spent money on some stuff, we could’ve spent that money on other stuff, I either regret it or I don’t. Either way, I’m still spending time with somebody else’s poop.
Would I do it again?
When I started drafting the post (a couple months ago), I was on the fence. But I’d say yes, now. Especially since we already have the shells.
It doesn’t feel like a lot of work to keep us in clean diapers. Early on, we were already doing laundry every other day to handle the burp cloths and other towels, so it didn’t add a big chore. I like that we won’t run out of diapers. It isn’t hard to get a pack of diapers, but it is one less thing to think about. (I suppose I get more stressed about having to leave my house than having to run the laundry?)
And although I do have gripes about leakage and tattered old inserts, I think we can address them by getting set up with a service that launders cloth diapers. Instead of owning these inserts - which make up the majority of my washing and drying, and also fall apart - we could have somebody drop off clean cloths and take away our dirty ones. And I can just stuff those into the shells. In fact, I may switch to this method before Toby is potty-trained.
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So, that’s the post about diapers. Feels good to get that one off my list.