As long promised, I shall start the cloth diapering post.
Here are my cloth diapers. Aren’t they beautiful?
We use the BumGenius 3.0 diapers. I have nineteen cloth diapers. I have two of each color that BumGenius makes. (Dear BumGenius, No purple or red? Why ever not? I would buy them immediately. Love, Jen.) Yes, that adds up to eighteen diapers. But I actually have three of the light blue, one that lives full time in the diaper bag.
Since I am obsessed with order and such, I always keep my diapers in this color order (rainbow order, of course, with dark pink standing in for red) and I use them in order, to ensure that they will wear evenly. (Yeah, yeah, I know, I am a weirdo. Just wait until you see how I even organize the wipes.) I move through the colors. I used to start each day at dark pink, but I was never getting to the end and therefore never using the whites or light pinks. So we changed that and we just keep going around the color spectrum.
Now, here are my cloth wipes and my spray bottle. I did not get the lighting very good, but my wipes are actually very cute as well, with colored edging. Barb got me the first pack for my shower and therefore I think of her a lot when I am changing Elizabeth, which is not necessarily how people want to be thought of, all in conjunction with baby poop.
I have thirty wipes, two packs of fifteen. You (obviously) need more wipes than diapers because you will use more than one wipe per diaper change. I also store these and use them in color order. (There are five of each color.) I do this mainly because I am kind of afraid that I will accidentally throw one of these into the wastebasket for trash, which is next to and identical to the wastebasket for diapers. So by folding them and using them in color order, I am constantly taking inventory and theoretically could save it out of the garbage if one should accidentally end up there. Which one hasn’t, so far.
Diaper rash cream cannot be used with cloth diapers. It gets into the cloth and makes them not waterproof anymore. You don’t need it as much because cloth breathes and you don’t get as much rash. Now, here is the part where I contradict myself. You can use diaper rash cream, if you need it, but you have to use a liner. I got some fleece and cut up my own liners, but you can buy them too. (Don’t. Fleece is cheap and you don’t have to hem it. So if you cannot use scissors to cut up pieces of fleece in rectangles to fit inside a diaper, well, then you are not reading this website because you are too unintelligent to read.) Then you just use the fleece liner to keep the diaper rash cream away from your cloth diaper. Wash your liners separately to keep the diaper rash cream from transferring to the diapers in the wash. But honestly, I really don’t have to use cream because she almost never has any rash and any that she does get goes away on its own.
Okay, next up- washing cloth diapers and then traveling outside the house with cloth diapers. Then we shall have (if we need one) a post answering the questions you still have about cloth diapers, so ask away, if I have skipped anything.