I took lots of pictures and may write a more detailed post later as a guest blogger to earn some free diapers (at this point most of my free dipes will be gifts), but my loyal readers need an update, I realize!
So, we've traveled twice before and used only cloth. Once, when Bunny was two months old, my husband took the young adults on a weekend retreat (he's also the young adult pastor at our church) and over Christmas when we traveled 7 hours to see my family we used cloth exclusively. Both times, all we had were pocket diapers. At the retreat I experimented with hand washing them. I found that it was possible, but that it's difficult to hand wash and hand dry microfiber inserts because they just hold SO MUCH WATER! I was getting blisters from wringing them out and they weren't drying fast enough! (I think I only had 15ish diapers in my stash then, and since Bunny was younger and only breastfed--no solids--at that point, she went through more.
In the end, I found a dryer and just machine dried them all. I found that hand washing pockets is doable but not ideal
Over Christmas I just used my parents washer and dryer with the pockets. This worked fine. It was much like cloth diapering at home... except that pockets are sort of bulky to carry around. I had about 20 diapers at this time.
This past weekend, I bought prefolds and flats and brought 29 of them with me. (17 prefolds and 12 flats). I didn't realize how much less my daughter needs to be changed now that she is 7 months old and that nearly 30 diapers would be unnecessary if I was planning on washing them--which I was. Since I'm somewhat chicken about using prefolds at night, I brought 6-8 pockets with me for night time. She only used four. She generally gets changed only once at night even though she wakes up more than once on some nights.
And prefolding worked well! I'm still not the best at using prefolds. I'm awkward about putting them on with the snappi and only using a wrap. No matter how you slice it, it will never be as easy to put a prefold or a flat diaper on a baby as it is to put an All in One or a pocket diaper--or even a fitted.
But I liked it! I didn't mind that I was awkward at it! I'm such a cloth diaper enthusiast that I enjoy trying everything!
ANd I washed them--hand washed them in the bathtub and dried them in front of a roaring fireplace. There was a dryer available because this was a retreat center with separate houses for showers, bathrooms, washrooms, etc, but I guess I wanted to know that I would be capable of cloth diapering in a worse-case scenario. Ha ha! Next I'll have to try it while camping :-D. I'll wash them in the river or something while carrying my baby on my back :-P. ANyway, the clothesline I used was a rope my husband had along for some activity he did with the kids.
From now on, if a washer/dryer is an option, I"m using it because I don't want so much stiff fabric against my baby's skin.
It turns out that I didn't need to wash them at all, though. Bunny only went through 19 prefolds (I didn't even have to use the flats--talk about an awkward diaper to learn to use!) and four pockets. I could have just waited until I got home.
All in all, cloth diapering at a youth retreat was a successful experience. I enjoyed it! I don't have very many covers, though. I've discovered that Thirsties are, by far, my favorite. I brought four of my wool soakers, two thirsties (one Medium with velcro and one duo size 2 with snaps), a Bumkins, and two made from diaeprkit.com. I mostly used the Thirsties and the wool ones. But with wool I don't like to have anything OVER the cover because one of the positives of using wool is that it feels almost moist when the baby has wet so there's no guesswork about changing. No, it doesn't leak, or get anything else wet, but it does feel warm and moist. Have I mentioned I love wool???
1 comment:
Glad to hear it went well. You would be insane to try to CD at creation unless you went to a laundry mat.
Post a Comment