Our Journey To the Land of Fluff

Some people might wonder why we decided to use cloth diapers, so here is how it began...
With Aiden I never even entertained the thought of using cloth diapers. Then when I was pregnant with Landon a couple of my friends were using cloth on their kids. I looked up a little information, decided it wasn't for us, and figured that was the end of the story.
Fast forward to after landon was born. He was a few weeks old, we had two kids in diapers and I was spending a fortune on Landon's alone. So I revisited the thought of cloth diapers. I looked up a lot of information online, I decided that if I used cloth diapers part time for even just a couple of months we would be saving money, but my hold up was the initial investment.
That's when I found AI2s (all in twos), and came across Flips. It was $50 for a 'day pack', 2 covers and 6 inserts, and the covers could be reused throughout the day. So I decided I would wash them every day, and use disposables when we were out or when they were dirty. And then if I didn't like cloth diapers I wouldn't feel committed.
I called Cutie Tooties (they were Knoxville's cloth diaper store, who are now sadly closed) and they had lots of Flips in stock, so we drove to bearden and made our first cloth diaper purchase.
I had also read that we could only use particular detergents, but I wanted one that I could easily purchase, so I bought a box of original Tide.
I got my diapers prepped and ready to go, and had leaks the first 2 changes. I was discouraged. But I knew the diapers had great reviews, so I knew I must be doing something wrong. We played with the fit a little bit, and soon they were working great !
I loved it! It was so neat, change the diaper, throw it in a pail, when you have enough to wash-throw them in the washer , and Voila! , more diapers, with no money spent.
Within a couple of days I wanted a couple of more, so I had my husband go to the cloth diaper store and get me an Econobum trial kit. It's an one size diaper cover, with 3 prefolds. I thought this was a good idea because it was pretty cheap, at $12 for the set. So when we stopped using cloth diapers there wouldn't be any money lost...
I was loving it even more, we were full time cloth diapering with our little bitty stash at that point, so I started watching for sales, and buying more diapers, online and in store. I decided we would use them exclusively for 6 months until he started solids, and then if I couldn't handle it we would stop.
We ended up with a
I eventually switched from Tide to Rockin Green, a detergent for cloth diapers.
Then I made another big step. I had read about cloth wipes, but decided that that was far too 'crunchy' for me. After finding disposable wipes being washed with my diapers, I realized that maybe cloth wipes would be so bad. I mean, we are used to rolling our wipe up in our diaper and throwing them away, and at that point I was finding wipes in our washed diapers, where I wrapped it into the diaper and forgot that the wipe needed to be thrown away separately. So it seemed logical that using cloth wipes would be simpler.
I bought 2 dozen wipes(I love tiny tush terry wipes) , some bumgenius bottom spray, some kissaluvs diaper lotion potion, and some washy wafers to dissolve and make wipe solution.
And now, we haven't used a disposable wipe or diaper on Landon since.
My thoughts on pros and cons on cloth diapering:
Pros:
It saves money.

Its 'green'.

If changed properly they help prevent diaper rash .

There's no worrying about whether you need to go to the store because you are out of diapers.

They are sooo cute!

They keep messes in better.

Cons:
You need to use a liner for diaper cream, but we've never had a rash with them, so that's no problem.

You do have to do laundry to have clean diapers, but come on, the washing machine does the work.

They take up more room in a diaper bag ( but flip inserts and covers take up much less!)

They are more expensive up front. But it didn't take us long at all to build up a decent stash. And the money you save in the long run is well worth it.

They can be sold, saving you even more money. Think, you spent, say $200 on diapers. You easily resale them for 50 percent of what you paid, perhaps much more. In the end you spent $100 . Come on, who can beat that. ;-)

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