How Cloth Diapering Saved Our Onesies!

When Jack was born, we learned (quickly!) that this parenting gig was not as easy as we had assumed it would be.

We knew, in theory, that we would be short on sleep those first few weeks (even though I didn't really believe this because all of the pictures of babies in my pregnancy magazines slept snugly in their little cribs, so of course my baby would sleep soundly in his crib too, right??). What we didn't realize was that OUR KID WOULDN'T SLEEP - at all - and we were looking at years, not mere weeks, of sleeplessness (says the mom whose child is almost three and still wakes up at least once a night).

We also knew that breastfeeding could be tough at first, but we had no idea how physically and mentally exhausting it would be trying to correct a bad latch for the first several months while dealing with NO SLEEP (because we thought we'd all be sleeping through the night by 6 weeks...HA!).

Also? We knew that babies pooped and peed a lot and would need a lot of diapers. But we were under the impression that poop and pee stayed in diapers and it wouldn't be that much trouble to change him. And, like the other lessons we learned the hard way, we soon realized that we were wrong and poop and pee *didn't* just stay in the baby's diaper until it was time to change him. Oh, no. We learned all too soon the devastation the dreaded Poop Explosion could wreak on our clean laundry, our changing table, the floor...and on ourselves.

Let me back up a second to a blissful pregnancy memory. I was pregnant with my first baby. I thought for sure this was going to be a piece of cake. A few weeks before Jack was born, I remember washing and sorting through all of the clothes we had been given. I had enough onesies to fill most of the closet. I remembered everyone telling me, "You can never have too many onesies!" as my friends and family unloaded onesie after onesie after onesie on us.

I thought, "Geez, ok, I get it...baby might throw up here and there...how many of these things do I really need??"

Well. It turned out everyone was right. Jack was a constant pooper. Every time he ate, he pooped. And he ate a lot. And those little Pampers I had? Yeah. They couldn't even *kind of* contain the destruction. I cannot tell you how many times I changed his clothes in one day...I went through those onesies like they were going out of style. I went from wondering, "Will he ever even get to wear all of these?" to washing a load of onesies/pants/t-shirts/pajamas a DAY so I could keep him clothed.

The Diaper Genie was filled to overflowing most of the time. We were constantly running out to the store for more wipes or diapers (and the nearest store was fifteen minutes away). I was slathering those cute little baby clothes in stain remover every day to keep them from staining.

But...things changed when Jack was about seven months old. I had a couple of bumGenius 3.0 One-Size pocket diapers shoved in a drawer in Jack's room that I had received at our baby shower (I probably found them when I was looking for something clean for Jack to wear!). I decided to give them a whirl.

And guess what?

Not only did I suddenly have the child with the World's Cutest Fluffy Butt, but I also now had diapers that (GASP!) contained the poop.

So I did what any reasonable person would do. I bought more!

Here is a picture of Jack in his white BG diaper, around eight months old.

I used the cloth diapers I had (about 6 in the beginning) until they ran out, and used disposables while they were washing (and overnight until I found a solution that worked for us). I added more diapers to my stash as I could afford it.

When I got pregnant with my second child, I went through all of Jack's old clothes to decide what I wanted to keep and what I wanted to donate. As I started pulling his old clothes out of the bins I noticed that many of them had poop stains. As diligent as I thought I had been about laundry, I was apparently unable to keep up with it all.

Washing cloth diapers turned out to be easier and less labor intensive than removing stains from explosive disposable diapers.

I decided to cloth diaper my daughter from day one.

Here is Claire, 6 weeks old, in her bumGenius Elemental diaper.


And here she is, at 8 weeks old, in her Applecheeks Size 1 diaper.


And guess what? I have not had one (I swear, not one!) poop eruption. Go figure...that unpleasant little piece of parenthood we had just accepted as part of the deal was avoidable all along.

Now, if I could just find a way to get my children to sleep....!

My name is Carrie and I am a Stay at Home Mom to two beautiful children, Jack and Claire. I like horses, tea, and getting fluffy mail and loves to write on her blog: burpclothsandsaddlepads.blogspot.com