Is washing cloth diapers the nightmare it's cracked up to be?

Whenever I tell my friends that we're using cloth diapers, one of the most common responses goes something like this: "Oh my GAWD, you must doing laundry 24-7!!! How do you handle it?"

"Easy!" I tell them. "I get my husband to do it!"

Heh...

All joking aside, I've got to say that using cloth diapers hasn't chained me (or my husband) to the washer/dryer at all. We wash a load of cloth diapers about every two and a half days, so that works out to two or three loads a week. Not too bad, really, considering the fact that we wash Monkey Boy's clothes that often anyway.

If you plan to use cloth diapers, here are some questions you'll have to consider at some point:

• Should I use a dry pail or a wet pail for my cloth diapers? (A wet pail is a diaper pail that's full of water and some sort of antibiotic or cleaning solution, such as bleach, detergent, or tea tree oil).
  
  
• Should I soak my cloth diapers before washing them? (Either in a wet pail or in the washer itself.)
  
  
• Should I wash my cloth diapers in hot or cold?
  
  
• How many rinse cycles should I run my cloth diapers through?
  
  
• What sort of detergent or soap should I use with my cloth diapers?
  
  
• To bleach or not to bleach?
  

Personally I like to keep things as simple as possible. (Why? Because I'm lazy.)

We use a dry pail because frankly, a wet pail seems like way too much of a hassle. In order to keep odors to a minimum, we rinse and wring out any diapers that have poop in them before throwing them in to the pail. The lid of the pail has a space to put a deodisk -- a disk-shaped deodorant cake -- to deal with odors.

(Oh, how I love that deodisk. It totally nullifies the diaper stank. Right now, Monkey Boy's bedroom has a delightful citrus smell in it, like someone's been squeezing an orange peel in there. Mmm... orangey.)

When it's time for us to do another load, we fill the washing machine with hot water and throw in some ecofriendly biodegradable detergent (it's called VIP, but I think it's only available in Canada -- not sure) and 1/4 cup of Borax. Once the machine is full of water, we add the diapers and let them soak for about five or ten minutes before putting them through a rinse cycle.

Once that's done, we add any of Monkey Boy's clothes that need to be washed and run everything through a regular cycle with hot water, then rinse with cold.

That's it! And so far we haven't had any staining, stink, or rash issues at all.

So really, washing our cloth diapers has only added about 10-15 minutes to our regular laundry routine. In the grand scheme of things, that's nothing. Knowing what I know now, I'd continue to use cloth diapers even if we had to go to a laundromat to do our washing. What's an extra 10 to 15 minutes every few days?

Especially when compared to running out of diapers in the middle of the night and having to drive around town looking for a convenience store that sells diapers and is still open at 1:00 in the morning.

(I'm sure that doesn't happen to everyone, but I know at least three people who've had to make a midnight run for disposables! Definitely something I'm happy to avoid...)

One thing: we've found that drying our cloth diapers takes a little longer than regular laundry, especially when we're drying the fitted cloth diapers, which are thicker than the cotton prefolds we usually use. If we're doing a load of fitteds plus prefolds and diaper covers, we tend to keep them in the dryer for a full hour (whereas our regular laundry usually takes only 40 minutes to dry).

Of course, if you're worried about excessive electricity bills, you can always hang your diapers to dry. And the nifty thing is, sunshine naturally bleaches cloth diapers, so if they have any poo stains on them, the sun will bleach them back to their original whiteness. AND it will help reduce any lingering odors on your cloth diapers.

Sunshine: a free way to dry your dipes, AND bleach them, AND kill odors. Reason #195857 why Mother Nature is just so darned cool.

Cloth diapering: Dealing with the "ick" factor

A fellow blogger mulling over the "cloth diapers vs. disposables" question recently asked me how I dealt with the "ick" factor of cloth diapering.

(The "ick" being the little treasures Monkey Boy regularly deposits in his diaper for us to find when we change him.)

"What do you do," she asked. "Empty solids into a toilet? Do you have to wring it out to get rid of liquids? Ick. And if you change it while you're out, can you just put the used one in a plastic baggie to take home? Ick."

Ick indeed, if you were dealing with the kind of poops that come out of adult bums, or teenage bums, or even snot-nosed little kid bums.

But the great thing is about newborns is, their runny little breastfed poos DON'T STINK.

It's true -- they don't!

And, not only do those little Hershey squirts start out so small to be virtually insignificant -- during the first week of your baby's life, you're actually WANTING him or her to poo, WAITING for it, BEGGING for it, because a decent number of poos per day is a good indication that your baby is eating enough and is healthy.

(This is how they mess with your head and turn your entire value system upside down. Poo good! Whiskey and cigarettes bad!)

Of course, the poos do get bigger over time, and they do eventually start to smell (especially when baby starts to eat something other than breastmilk -- which is why we won't be introducing solids to our Monkey Boy until he's roughly 13 years old).

But the process of "ickification" takes place over a period of months, and is so gradual that you're able to acclimatize yourself to it, so that dunking a pooey cloth diaper into a toilet bowl or a sink of hot water and swishing it around to get the chunky bits off actually doesn't seem that gross at all. Neither does sticking a dirty diaper into a plastic bag until you're able to dump it into the diaper pail.

Now, my attitude toward this might change once Monkey Boy starts eating solid food. My brother (a father of three) takes great sadistic pleasure in assuring me that the poos will indeed start to smell so bad that I will need a clothespin on my nose in order to deal with them. But I'll deal with that problem once I get to it (most likely by getting my lovely unsuspecting husband to change most of the pooey diapers, heh heh heh...).

AND... just in case you're caught up in the whole "cloth diaper vs. disposable" debate -- were you aware that the "proper" way to use disposable diapers is to scrape off all the poo and dump it into the toilet before throwing the diapers in the garbage?

Surprise! That's how the diaper manufacturers intend for their customers to use them -- at least, that's what they say when the ecohounds are hot on their heels.

But do you know ANYONE who actually does that?

So yeah, there's definitely an "ick" factor involved in dealing with diapers of any type. I suppose the advantage of cloth diapers is that you can wash the "ick" right out of a diaper and have it come out looking and smelling clean and fresh. Once you "ick" up a disposable dipe, on the other hand, it gets dumped into a landfill and stays "ick" for a very, very long time.

Ick.