Cloth Diapering: Making The Choice

Cloth Diapering: Making the Choice

When I was pregnant with my first child, I started reading about cloth diapering. My friends thought I was nuts. I got all kinds of advice from those who did and did not have kids encouraging me to save myself some work and just use disposables. The best responses I got from those I surveyed in my age group was something like, “Well, it probably will work…” I wanted to write a post about cloth diapering in case some of my dear readers are considering using cloth and my goal is to educate and encourage anyone-everyone!- to use them.

My worst nightmare in regards to cloth diapering was that at 3am some morning my husband and I would have a huge fight about me making such a crazy/unpopular/unrealistic choice as cloth diapers. That fight never happened because cloth diapering is not crazy, is gaining popularity quickly and has been totally realistic. I decided to try cloth diapers with the idea being that I could always sell my cloth online, make my money back, and use disposables like everyone else I knew. I never sold my cloth and in fact have a feeling of careful preservation over my collection of cloth diapers because I have loved using them so much.

It bears mentioning that I am not an environmentalist in a traditional sense. The green I honestly care about the most is money. That’s the cold fact, folks. Money talks big time to me and cloth diapers save a ton of money. The book “Changing Diapers” by Kelly Wels was an excellent resource for cloth diapering and her figures matched everything else I read online which was that cloth diapering will save about 2 thousand dollars per child.

Back to being a not-environmentalist: I am however keenly aware of the idea that sometime, our society will have to deal with our terrible system of landfills. It is a very gross idea indeed to put urine and feces in a plastic diaper that will take untold hundreds of years to decompose. Cloth diapering is a very green choice indeed when you consider you skip putting all that plastic that you paid for into a landfill.

Even if we had an alternative to landfills at the moment that I was changing said diaper, another thing I considered when choosing to use cloth was that yucky feeling of using a maxi pad for more than a few hours. Plastic doesn’t breath and I know that I hate that feeling on my skin. I imagined my sweet baby’s bottom in plastic for two years and it seems obvious that the plastic contributes in great part to diaper rash, or at least to an uncomfortable feeling.

I could go on and on about all the other reasons a person would choose cloth (like the petroleum industry may be one I don’t want to support, for example) and I hope this post doesn’t turn into a debate. I mean only to inform and encourage.

So I chose cloth and I couldn’t be happier about it.