Saturday, May 08, 2010

Day 1 of Fully Cloth Diapers!

To start with, I am thrilled to say that I have WON A CLOTH DIAPERING PRIZE!!! It was one of the pre-hunt prizes for the Green Quiz Quest I mentioned in the last post and it's 7 nice baby wipes, a travel size wetbag and some wipe solution cubes. How cool is that? I never win anything but will definitely review the new stuff when it arrives.
Today was the girls first day in completely cloth diapers after a partial day in cloth yesterday and a couple days in cloth little gpants from gdiapers with their disposable inserts. Her rash went away within just the first two days of being out of traditional disposables (other than nighttime and she was a little pink in the mornings). This makes me think she was either reacting to a chemical in the 'sposies or just the fact that they don't breathe at all! My little lions prefolds didn't arrive until yesterday morning and it took all day and all of last night to prep them so I didn't have enough cloth to get by with. :) Since a big part of our goal with cloth diapering is to save money, I didn't want to spend a huge amount on our stash but because I wanted to get the girls in fully cloth as soon as possible due to Paige's rash issues stalking the FSOT area over at diaperswappers.com wasn't really a good option either since I was needing enough to get going with ASAP! (We'd spent so much time discussing Paige's rashes recently that one day we realized Kyra was singing Paige a little song in the car about Paige's little bum-bum.) This led me to decide that prefolds and flats with covers were the right choice to make up the bulk of our cloth diapering options with a few pocket diapers thrown in for good measure in case anyone who was a little less diaper savvy ever needed to change them. I chose 4 Kawaii brand covers from theloveyourbaby.com and also 3 different styles of Kawaii pocket diapers from the same site as they were VERY affordable (and cute too!). I'm very happy with them so far! The fabric is soft and stretchy (I didn't know what PUL was like so I didn't know what to expect.) I chose all snap closures instead of Velcro/Aplix as that was what appealed to me and so far I'm happy with that. The pocket diapers each come with two microfiber inserts so you can add an extra one for nighttime wear or heavy wetters. The diapers and covers are all one size meaning they'll fit a baby from a small infant to a large toddler depending on how you adjust the rise length with the snaps. (Paige still needs the shorter rise sometimes depending on what diaper she's got underneath.) For prefolds I ordered unbleached Indian cotton seconds from littlelions.com and am so glad I went with the seconds as they were very inexpensive and the flaws that make them seconds are nearly unnoticeable. I ordered infant and preemie size to use as doublers/inserts and premium/toddler size for use as actual diapers. (Only the infants and premium are here so far, the newborn and toddler are still on the way.) They came with some free diaper pins too so eventually I might get brave and try those instead of just my Snapi closures. I also have a bunch of flannel receiving blankets, some of which I had and some of which I bought super cheap on Craigslist, to use as flat diapers and cut up for more cloth wipes. We also have 8 pairs of Gerber cotton trainers for Kyra to wear under her covers when she's feeling pottyish which sadly hasn't been very often this week. Phil has been working on installing a diaper sprayer for me too and I love it! For my diaper pail I'm just using a plain small kitchen garbage can with a flip lid and no liner so I'll just spray it out with the diaper sprayer after emptying it. One less thing to wash and I figure if I decide I want liners later, I can always get them. So THAT is my starter stash. So far I'm very happy with it except I have decided I need a few more covers since I'm using them on both girls. Oh, and we had four pooie diapers today and I still like cloth diapering so I figure that's a good sign.

After the success with the last contest, I've decided to enter another. :) This time it's at clothdiapers.blogspot.com and the grand prize is a $100 gift certificate to the Cotton Babies site! They're the people who make bumgenius, flip, econobum and hemp babies if any of that means anything to you and if it doesn't go check them out at CottonBabies.com. These are the sort of diapers I DROOL over and I think I'm going to fill out my meager cover stash with some flip covers so it would be great to get to do that for free or cheap with contest winnings and you should enter too! :D The contest is a Mother's Day contest and the entry task is to write a short bit to a special little person in your life about why you're glad they were born. I chose to write about Paige but I think I'm going to try to find time to write one up for Kyra too sometime this week and print them off for their baby books.

On a side note, Paige got another tooth (on the top, right of the middle ones so she's finally less lopsided) just over a week ago and Kyra got her 4th 2 year molar FINALLY last month but I forgot to mention it. :)



No comments: