Organizing All That Fluff

Every family will have their own way of organizing their cloth diapers stash. What works for us might not work for you. But there are a few ways that you can make it easier for everyone.

1. Keep everything in one spot. You don't want to be upstairs taking off a poopy diaper only to realize all your wipes are downstairs or in the other room.
2. Use like grouping. That is, keep your daytime diapers, nighttime diapers, daddy/grandparent/ babysitter diapers, daycare diapers, wipes, covers, etc., grouped together. When you are changing a diaper in the middle of the night, it helps to know exactly where to reach to get exactly what you need. And it makes things easier when you are showing the grandparents or babysitter which diapers they should use.
3. Put everything away as soon as it's washed. Refer back to the first point. Otherwise you'll be like me. I can't tell you how many times I've had to stop changing a diaper and run into the other room to grab some wipes. Learn from my mistakes!
4. Don't be afraid to change your system. Cloth diapering evolves. I'm finding that diapers that fit when our daughter was small don't fit now that she's bigger. We now have daytime and nighttime diapers. Our organization system has changed a few times over the past 15 months. Flexibility is good.

Before our daughter was born, we had a small basket on top of the dresser to keep diapers in. We stored the rest of them in a cupboard in her dresser. We quickly realized that wasn't very helpful for us. We had this wonderful changing station, and we never used it. So we quickly bought a bigger basket and started keeping our diapering system downstairs where we did most of our changes. We used this system for quite a while and found it very easy, especially in the first few months of learning to be parents.

As she grew older, we accumulated even more diapers, and diaper changes became more of a sport, we moved all her diapers upstairs into her room. They now occupy an entire drawer and cupboard, and this is the best setup we've had so far. It's very easy to put everything away, to pull it out, to show grandparents/ babysitters what to use, etc.

The most important thing to remember when you are organizing your stash is that you can change it! Figure out what works best for you. Do you like keeping everything in drawers or baskets? Or do you like to store it in cubbies in the closet? Upstairs? Downstairs? Figure out what works best for your family and how/where you change your child's diaper. And make sure to take a picture of all that beautiful fluff!

Bio: Jennifer Esposito - I've been cloth diapering my daughter, Adele, for a little over a year. She wore her first cloth diaper when she was 6 days old and was in them full time at 3 weeks. I've been married to my best friend for 4 years. I'm an editor by trade, and during my free time I like to run, sew, or read.