Who We are and Why I am Cloth Diapering

As this first post, I'd like to introduce myself and our little family. I am an American married to a Frenchman living in France with our two adorable children, Gabriel who is 2 and 1/2 and Louise who is 6 months. We are both teachers and the rest of the time we enjoy hanging out with our kids and traveling. Just recently, I decided to switch to cloth diapering for our two children.

To begin with, I am not in any way a green treehugger environmental fanatic. When one of my friends, who is, told me she was going to use cloth diapers with her baby, I just laughed, saying that she'll end up changing her mind really quickly. And, she did! She now uses biodegradabe disposables because of arguments against cloth diapering that convinced her to switch to disposables. But, my point is that this is not the main reason I switched to cloth.

The main reason I switched was for economical reasons. We plan on having 3 kids and already, the costs of disposables for two in diapers run anywhere from 75 to 100 dollars a month. I did the calculation, and even if I bought a middle of the line option for cloth diapers (meaning having a mix of different systems), I'd recup those expenses within a matter of months. If I buy a good supply now, I won't have to reinvest with the third child.

The second reason is for convenience. This actually sounds silly that cloth diapers could be more convenient, but to me, they are. Our laundry room is literally the room next door to the kids' room. I happen to love doing laundry. So, for me it seems way more practical to do a load or two of laundry every couple days rather than haul dirty stinky diaper bags down to the trash (we live in an apartment) every couple days. What's more is that with disposables, the kids' room always had this awful odor because of the piled up trash due to our laziness to not always take the trash down when we should. With cloth, the odor is gone and kept in a tightly closed diaper bin until I do the wash every couple days.

Finally, no leaks. My kids would always wake up, even with the popular Pampers, at least a couple times a week with overnight leaks, meaning I would have to do even more laundry to wash their pjs. With cloth, everything stays in.

We are not full time cloth diapering, at least not yet. Our daycare will not accept cloth diapers because the disposables we furnish once every two months are actually shared between the kids, so if ours use cloth diapers, it messes up their organization. So, every morning they go to daycare (4 times a week) I still use a disposable. Also, my MIL (mother in law) is not yet aware of our transition but when she does become aware, I am sure the reaction is going to be far from positive since she is always saying to me 'Oh, how convenient these disposable wipes and diapers are, back in my day, it was awful, I was always doing laundry' So, if she takes the kids or if we are on a long vacation where we absolutely can't launder without causing a huge inconvenience, I am planning on using disposables. But, for short weekend trips for less than 3 days where I can come home and do laundry, cloth it will be. Personally, I don't feel like I can ask relatives or friends who are more or less unopen to the idea of cloth diapering to use their laundry facilities.

My husband is open to anything I do with the kids because I am the one who changes their diapers most of the time. However, it has to be convenient for him if ever he needs to change a diaper. And, if cloth diapering affects the organization of a trip, or we have to stop everything to do laundry etc... he will not be open to that. In my next post, see what options I have chosen to make cloth diapering very practical and not much more work than a disposable.