The Work At Home Mom Project

I warned you in my introductory post that I might talk about cloth diapers. Well, here you go.

I figure that this is on-topic in one way: saving money. If you want to be able to stop working for the “man”, and work at home, making money online is probably going to come slowly. Very VERY slowly. And in the mean time, you’d better start saving your pennies. One awesome way to do that is by using cloth diapers (assuming your little ones are still in diapers, of course).

We’ve had peanut in cloth diapers since almost day one. (We had planned a home birth but ended up at the hospital, so had a disposable there — then used the ‘sposies for a couple more days until all the meconium was gone, because I don’t wish washing out that tarry poop on anyone.) But we opted for a diaper service, rather than the do-it-yourself cloth diaper option.

It should be noted that a diaper service is NOT really a cheaper option than disposables, although I will defend to the death that it is a more environmentally friendly option. (Despite what the diaper companies might have you believe!) In many scenarios it can appear to be the same price as disposables, however some friends who’ve done both claim that the disposables were much cheaper when the babe was older, as he used far fewer, and they could be found on sale pretty easily if you keep your eyes open.

However, I think there’s very little room for error in saying that do-it-yourself route of cloth diapering is much cheaper than disposables. The big downside is of course the laundry. I was definitely scared of the laundry when peanut was first born, and thus the reason we went with the service. But now that he’s older and doesn’t go through near so many dipes, I think it would be pretty reasonable. And so, we’re planning to take the plunge: buying our own diapers and ditching the service.

Yesterday I went to our local amazing Extraordinary Baby Shoppe (love that store!), where I picked up a half dozen Bummis organic pre-fold diapers. For the uninitiated, a pre-fold is essentially a rectangular piece of fabric, divided into thirds, with 8 layers of cotton down the middle, and 4 layers of cotton on either side. The idea is that you fold these layers together to make a super absorbent center, but unfolded it will dry relatively quickly after being washed. You can either just stick the folded diaper in a wrap cover and put that on the babe, or pin the sides to make a diaper that stays on by itself (which you would still cover in a waterproof cover of some sort).

The decision to go with pre-folds is still not 100%, thus the reason we only bought 6 of them. (We’d probably need 2 – 3 dozen to get by exclusively on pre-folds and not have to laundry daily.) At this point, I’m still in the pre-wash stage (the cotton doesn’t become fully absorbent until it’s been laundered at least 3 times), so I haven’t had a chance to really test them out. My biggest concern (apart from washing poop – more on that later), is that peanut is going to be so incredibly squirmy that it will be impossible to get them on. Our diaper service that we’ve been using provides fitted diapers, which are still a challenge to get on, but I’ve perfected the art of snapping them up while he’s crawling away; I don’t think I’ll be able to do that with a pre-fold.

Other options outside of pre-folds include getting fitted diapers like the ones from the service, or all-in-ones which have a cover and diaper all in one (duh), or “pocket diapers”, which are a waterproof cover with a stay-dry lining of some sort on the inside (usually micro-fleece), and a pocket in the back where you stuff an absorbent soaker. The advantages of the all-in-ones and pocket diapers are that they’re really just like disposables in the way they go on. The disadvantage is that they’re way more costly! I think with pocket diapers the idea is that if there’s been no poop you can just swap out the soakers rather than laundering the whole thing, but you’d still need a significant number of pricy diapers to get through before laundry day.

Pre-folds on the other hand are cheap ($25 for 6 of the “baby” size, which goes from 15-40 lbs, quite a bit cheaper for premie and infant sizes), and the only other expense is covers which we already have a bunch of from using the diaper service. We’ve really been able to get away with only 4 covers in each size pretty well — they rarely get soiled with the fitted diapers, as they generally hold in poop. I’m not sure if we’ll have the same luck with the pre-folds, however the covers can at least be washed by hand in the sink and left to dry in the bathroom and be ready to be reused within several hours if necessary. (Can’t say that for all-in-ones or pocket diapers!)

All told, I’m expecting our cash outlay will be around $150 for diapers, and another $80 for covers. If I’d started peanut earlier I would have had to buy other sizes of pre-folds, so the cost would be higher from birth, however even if you hit $400, you’re still looking at a much cheaper solution than our service (which is $20/wk) or disposables.

Of course, we haven’t yet touched on the laundry. All the cloth advocates I’ve talked to and web sites I’ve read say that the laundry is “way easier than you think”. I’m really hoping that’s true and not just being used to try and sell me.  Part of my fear is that we have a front-loader washer, which for all it’s environmentally friendliness, apparently does not do a very good job getting diapers clean without some intervention. Multiple cycles, throwing in a wet towel to “trick” the machine in to thinking there’s a bigger load and adding more water — I’ve read a bunch of things on how to get them to wash cloth diapers well, but it sounds like everyone just needs to tweak their own routine for their own washer, so that will be a bit of a learning curve. I’ll let you know more on that next week when I actually get to that stage.

Oh, and the poop. Hmmm… with a service, you don’t do anything, you just throw the poopy diaper in a bag, then put the bag outside once a week and they take it away. Peanut’s breastfed poop was not at all stinky, so I never stressed about smell. The poop is getting slowly stinkier now though, so having it in his room for a week (during summer especially!) is looking less and less appealing. Another good reason to move on from the service. However, given that I don’t have the dedicated diaper washers that they do at the service, I think we’re going to have to  - ach – start scraping the poop into the toilet. I’ve read that some people use a special poop spatula (a poopula?), and others have a sprayer (like on your ktichen sink) that they use to spray the poop into the toilet. I’m not sure yet where we’ll go. For this trial week we’ll probably go with the poopula, since we’re not about to install a diaper sprayer in our bathroom quite yet. Again, this is an experiment, and I’ll let you know how that goes next week. Hopefully I won’t get covered in poop backspray.

So that’s the plan. I still have at least one more pre-wash to go before we enter the full experimental phase. But if all goes according to plan, then hopefully we can cut out one big monthly bill. Wish us luck!