Thursday, January 21, 2016

Adios cloth diapers!

We are a tiny bit crunchy hippie at our house in case you didn't know. Today, I washed the last of our cloth diapers and put them away to sell. Unbelievable that we've cloth diapered ALL 3 kids with cloth diapers from nearly birth until they were potty trained... although Luca seems to be riding this lets.not.potty.train.forever bandwagon. We are pretty chill, no 3 day potty training for us, no boot camp or anything like that. We figure they won't go to college in diapers so we'll just ride it out. But we as parents are done with cloth diapering and figure we don't have that much longer to go. We are switching to disposables until he's potty trained. (Here's to hoping that's before high school!)

Let's look back, we've cloth diapered the cheapest way since the start. We used Green Mountain diaper prefolds (super easy and durable!) with thirsties covers and a dry pail. Expense wise, heres the breakdown:

Trash can (for dry pail): $12
Wet bag liners for pail: $30
Wet bags: $30
Prefolds: $250
Diaper covers: $150
Snappis: $10
Diaper wipes aka wash cloths or cut up flannel: $20
Laundry soap: homemade and cheap

Total: $502

$502 for diapering 3 kids. Bella was in cloth from birth to 2 years, she potty trained just before she turned 2. Grayson was in cloth from birth to 3 years. Luca was in cloth from birth until now, which is 2 years and 11 1/2 months. I just googled that the average cost to diaper a child from birth to 2 1/2 is $1677.66. Holy batman! That means to diaper our 3 it would have costed us about $5,032.98. That's insanity! So we've saved over $4000.00!!

I'm proud of us that we made it as long as we did. I'm happy to say that it wasn't as bad as I thought and even my husband would agree. I'm also happy to say that eventually I'll be happy to be done with diapers for good. I'm not sharing this to toot our horn. I'm sharing this to tell you that it's possible. Cloth diapering isn't "hard core" as my husband initially referred to it as pre-diapers. I'm also sharing this to share our homemade soap recipe. It's tried and true for prefolds. I hope this helps one of you or more!

Cloth diaper laundry soap:
2 cups borax
2 cups washing soda
2 cups oxyclean

Mix it all together in a container. Use one tablespoon for small loads and 2 for larger loads.

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