12 Hour Plane Rides and Camping Are Possible With Fluff

I am a first time Dad. I live in Hawaii and am in the Navy. I was skeptical about cloth diapering at first, but eventually my wife convinced me to do it. Now I am completely on board and do my best to bring others to the cloth diapering ways.

Our first big diapering challenge came when our son was 2 months old. We decided to make a trip back home to Minnesota. So we thought…”I guess this will be the first time our little guy will wear disposables…” Wait, no we don’t want to do that. We can manage to pack everything we need we will just use disposables on the plane. Nope, we are going to continue cloth diapering this entire trip, including the 12 hours spent on a plane or in an airport. Here’s how we did it.

First we planned for the worst case scenario. We usually changed his diaper about every 4 hours, so what if we had to change him every 2 hours…or worse every hour? So we packed 12 diapers in a carry on. We packed about 15 cloth wipes and a travel size bottle of wipe solution. We also had a small pack of disposable wipes, just in case. We usually only need 1 wipe for each diaper change including the poo filled ones, so 15 should be good. Also we had a changing pad and 2 small wet bags. All of this was stuffed into my laptop backpack as a carry on. It was the epitome of daddy diaper bags…all the things I needed for cloth diaper changes along with all my personal
electronics!

When our son was 2 months old he was an excellent sleeper, he could sleep anywhere. So we planned his eating schedule around the flight as best we could. We had him feeding on takeoff and landing to prevent hurting his little ears from the pressure change, then he would sleep the majority of the flight. I changed him about every 2-4 hours. I would collect everything I need, head to the bathroom and change him. All in all, everything worked out pretty well.

Also, this plan worked for us because we were staying with family and could easily use their washer and dryer to wash the diapers. We had 12 diapers in our carry on, but then we had another 12 diapers in the checked baggage. We also had packed our wipe warmer in checked baggage. This may not be practical in all situations and using wipe solution in a spray bottle the whole trip would have been just fine. I’m not sure how we could have done this if we had been staying in a hotel or somewhere without a washer and dryer. I’m sure one day we will have to cross that road.

So despite people saying use disposables on the plane we thought we proved them all wrong and everything went smoothly. My family owns some vacation property in the woods where they have park model mobile homes set up. At this point once again we were told just use disposables again. But we are stubborn, especially my wife, on using cloth diapers 100% and were going to prove to everyone cloth diapering is possible “camping.” The wipe warmer did come with us to the camper but we would have had no problem with just the spray bottle of solution and wipes if we had to. The camping trip was about 2 days so as soon as we got back to my parents’ house we had to wash diapers again. Now at 6months in we can go about a week with our 30 diapers so camping could be longer. But is yet another challenge conquered. While visiting we received a Kalencom quick change kit as a gift. This made the returning flight even smoother. We always keep 2 diapers, 15 wipes and a spray bottle with solution and a wet bag in the quick change kit. Then of course we had more diapers in the carry on. We still use the quick change kit in our diaper bag, and it is a wonderful tool.

I hope this helps you make the decision to continue cloth diapering on vacation. All of our friends and family thought we were crazy for doing it, but we did it and it was pretty easy still.