When I was pregnant, I thought about cloth diapering but only briefly and never seriously. My mother, who used cloth diapers for all of her children, encouraged us to use disposable because we have a well/septic and to save time. I really wasn't concerned about drying out our well because in 5 years we've never had an issue (finally an advantage to having a swamp across the street). The septic would be fine; it's pretty new and well maintained. The biggest reason we didn't go with cloth diapers earlier was because my husband, Steve, and I both work full time (boo) and I was afraid of spending my free time being a slave to laundry and not enjoying my family.
Disposables worked well for us. We had to experiment some with different brands until we found what fit him best but we never had any real horror stories. I wanted to try using cloth and I attempted to research it a little but I was totally overwhelmed! I started realizing there were these die hard cloth diaper women out there with boards, groups, and almost their own language. It's like they talk in code. Some of these women seem to look down on people who use disposable diapers. I had NO interest in becoming a die-hard cloth diaper user. There were also seemingly a million (1,000,000) different types of diapers, inserts, pre-folds, and other "parts" to these diapers. I thought there was no way cloth diapering was simple.
Last month Andrew got some sort of virus that caused his stomach to get upset and needless to say we were changing his diapers often. The effects of the virus lasted almost two (2) weeks and he had his first case of bad diaper rash. The ointment wasn't cutting it! He would scream and fight when it was time to change his diaper. We had to bring him to the doctor and she had some concerns that if we didn't get the rash under control soon it was going to get infected. She told us to start using some other creams which we did and I started researching what else I could do to help him. That's when I started reading that children who use cloth diapers are significantly less likely to get diaper rash.
I decided to start using cloth diapers at home but continue using disposables while he was at daycare. The problem was I had no idea where to start. It looked to me like I was going to have to crack the cloth diaper language and figure out what and how to use cloth diapers.
Convincing my husband to try cloth was much easier then I thought it was going to be. He was also desperate to clear up the diaper rash and was willing to try anything. I think he thought once the diaper rash was gone the cloth diapers would be gone too. The rash cleared up almost instantly after we started using cloth but the cloth diapers didn't disappear with the rash. They've have multiplied.
I'll share more about our switch to cloth in other blogs but don't expect to hear me talking in cloth diaper code, I'm still trying to figure that out!
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