When I was pregnant with my first child, cloth diapering hadn’t even crossed my mind. We entered parenthood armed with boxes of Swaddlers and Huggies. (Look, weren’t we cute? Now it’s Luvs if they’re lucky.)
And yet, a few months later, overwhelmed with daycare costs and probably too much research, I ordered a giant boxful of BumGenius cloth diapers on Amazon and wet bags from Etsy, and had high hopes cloth diapering would work for our little family of three.
I wanted to CD (cloth diaper) for all the right reasons: not contributing to landfills, saving money on diapers, my baby not sitting in bleached disposables. I thought I’d be able to use the same diapers for future kids. We cloth-diapered pretty much 100% of the time with our firstborn, unless we were on a road trip. I even took her out of her daycare when they changed their policy on cloth. The diapers were perfect for our Libbie. And she was darn cute in them, too.
Since then, we’ve had two more children. My second was also cloth-diapered most of the time from about four months onward. A little disenchanted with how my hook-and-loop diapers were wearing down, I bought a new assortment of snap diapers and covers with prefolds. We never did find a CD that worked at night for our little man, but otherwise he was in cloth.
And then number three came along, also a boy. I tried my hardest to keep that child in cloth but, without fail, he broke out into terrible rashes from the wetness. I’m sure there is some diaper that would have helped this, but at the time I had a 4-year-old, a 2-year-old, and an infant. No time and not a lot of funds to invest into trying different diapers. So when he was around a year, I finally folded and gave my diapers away to a friend who needed them.
So now I’m pregnant with our fourth child.
I have so much love for cloth. Pictures of cloth-diapered booties make my heart swell. I still stand behind all the reasons we went to cloth in the first place, and in my heart of hearts I desperately WANT to try cloth again on this child.
BUT.
We are going to be a family of six. Hence:
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I practically live in our van some days running children to various schools, church, and other places.
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I have mountains of laundry that I can not keep up with for anything.
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I will have FOUR children and a freelance career to keep up with.
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Did I mention the laundry? And how my 7-year-old daughter thinks something is dirty if it touched the floor? And how she plays with her socks like toys? And I have two boys who make no attempt at eating nicely or not rolling around in the dirt?
So I take deep breaths and realize…I just don’t think I can do it.
Maybe she will get here and I will feel completely different, but my priority in parenting is my own sanity. (Especially given my history of depression.) And thinking about doing laundry for six people plus washing cloth diapers every other day makes me a little too itchy.
I hate it. But I really can’t imagine using cloth this time around.
Same experience here esp with 3&4! i cd 1&2 at the same time. Then #3 from 6 mo to 1.5. poor #4 did not get cloth. Too much life going on, she was our fussiest, she was out tiniest and we’d need new ones anyways because the elastic was stretched out. Go regular target diapers!
Preach!! My fourth is now just over a year old and a cloth diaper has never touched his bum, after at least partially cloth-diapering the other three. I’d love it if I didn’t have to buy disposables, but I’m also a fan of my sanity. ?
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