Why Cloth Diapering? Part 1

One of the first questions that most people ask me is why I choose to cloth diaper. I did not start to CD until my little man was 14 months old, so I was well versed in the use of disposables (or sposies - as many call them). My husband and I had started to do a cash/envelope system for most of our daily expenses, which, of course, included diapers. That's when I started to realize how much we were spending. I had to budget $20 per week for diapers, wipes, etc. That is over $1000 in just 1 year. Considering that we are on a tight budget, and I hate throwing money away, which is what you are doing with disposables, I started to seriously research cloth diapers. And, honestly, it was the money savings that totally won me over. You have to put in a chunk of money up front, but the savings make it easy to swallow.

We have bought a wide variety of diapers as we started the journey of figuring out what we like. A number of the ones that we bought were of the more expensive brands. But, even with buying the more expensive brands, and investing in some of the other accessories like a pail liner, wet bag, etc, we have spent between $500-600 dollars. $600 is what I would have spent on 30 weeks of disposables - about 7.5 months and even if he potty trained early (for a boy) and was totally potty trained by 2 (and I DON'T think that is going to happen), we will have saved $200. If he is more of the typical boy and is potty trained by 3 - we will have saved over $1000. And, that's not even calculating the savings if we have another baby because we can use the same diapers. You can see over the long run, this is a huge money savings and that's with me starting late in the game. If we had started when the little man was born, the savings would have been even better.

Now, I will be honest, we still use disposables on occasion. The MDO program that the little man attends was not comfortable at first with cloth and since we have a box of diapers left, we have continued to send him in disposables. At this point, they would probably use cloth with us, but since we are moving to Tyler, we haven't pushed the issue. There have also been times when we have been traveling and didn't have easy access to laundry, that we've used disposables to fill in the gaps. As we have grown the diaper stash, we have needed disposables less and less.

I think that's enough for now, I'll do another post soon on some of the secondary reasons I have chosen to use cloth, but before I sign off, I'll leave you with this - aren't cloth diapers so much cuter than disposables?