There are so many choices you need to make when becoming a mom from how to feed your child, the stroller and car seat debacle, and evening learning about the birthing process that it can be overwhelming, exhausting and downright frustrating.
Today, in 2018, disposable diapering is the new norm. Disposable diaper companies armed with modern marketing flipped society as a whole, and many people don’t even know about cloth diapering, or that it works. We just jump right into the nearest package of disposable diapers.
Like many well-intentioned mamas, I came home from the hospital surrounded by disposable diapers and ready to tackle the task at hand: keeping my child alive.
Turns out, two weeks into disposable diapering and I hate it.
It’s not just those two weeks home from the hospital, it’s every time I’ve tried to disposable diaper from holidays with the family to travel trips with the kids. Even during periods of mental anguish, when I didn’t think I could anymore and pulled out a package of disposable diapers, I remembered how much I despise these paper pants.
I hate disposable diapers because
- Why does my kid need to smell like an old lady using too much perfume? You know that perfectly Pamper-ish smell? Gag. No Thanks.
- Why does my child’s urine smell slightly toxic and nausea? I switched to a disposable diaper with less perfume than said pampers and my child still stinks like some sort of toxic chemical factory. I miss the smell of a baby, dirty feet, and day-old yoghurt in her hair.
- Hold On? Why do I still have to touch poop almost daily because these diapers continue to burst open with even the gentlest explosive poops? Carrying around a change of clothes and enough wipes to clean up a mudslide is beginning to hurt my back (and my pocketbook).
- Taking the trash out nightly to prevent odour in the bedroom is not an enjoyable chore when it’s minus a million in the Canadian winter, I can’t even imagine the stank in a Canadian summer.
- And no, I don’t take the trash out nightly because between recycling, compost and trying waste less, this isn’t a chore in my house that needs to happen. Trash gets taken out every second or third day when it’s full.
- Oh Yikes! My last disposable, time to hit up the grocery store, or see if my Amazon Prime membership can arrive in time for the next poop! This constant fear of running out of diapers and having diapers that will fit is exhausting.
- $40 a month plus wipes, assuming I’m shopping Amazon for a relatively good deal (15 cents per diaper)… That’s like $1,000 by the time she’s done potty training, I could buy a Made in Canada cloth diaper stash for that and support our local economy ten times over…
Are you ready to try cloth diapering?
It really is easy.
It’s just a load of laundry. You can even handwash cloth diapers.
Check out the cloth diaper podcast to listen to tales of laundry stories from mama’s who make it work in all sorts of situations. Or shop with me at Nest & Sprout, Canada’s newest cloth diaper retailer and baby boutique.
Looking to know which cloth diaper is the best? I’ll stop you now because it doesn’t exist. Instead, these are my top three recommendations to get you going and learn about what might work for you. But really, just pick a diaper you love whether it’s the brand’s commitment to sustainability, the print, or the location of manufacture.
I don’t use disposable diapers anymore. It’s not worth the fustration, extra laundry, and the fuss. I hate spending money on something I’m tossing in the garbage, and many people I visit don’t even have weekly garbage pick up. Between two kids, that’s a lot of extra waste that’s just going to take 500 years to decompose.
The easiest way for me to cloth diaper is using my travel stash. This is how I cloth diaper when travelling and I think it might be the easiest way to do it full time. However, this strategy isn’t for everyone.
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