Cloth Diapering | It’s all about the money!

When given the opportunity to guest blog over here at The Eco Friendly Family I immediately responded with a “Yes, I’d love to!” Now what to share with you green minded folks. I’m sure some of you are way greener than us over at Waking Up Williams, but there was a topic that immediately popped into my mind, as I’ve been meaning to write about it for some time now.

We cloth diaper and the #1 question we get all the time is….How did you get your husband on board with cloth diapering? I’m serious when I say it’s the most asked question, usually after…eeewwww, do you wash the diapers yourself? So here’s my story about my husband to agree to folding, pinning and laundering cloth diapers. Not only had my husband never seen a cloth diaper, he had never changed a dirty diaper in his life. I was in for a challenge…so I thought.

I’m not sure when I decided to cloth diaper, I think there was some talk with a colleague about her desire to cloth diaper and I always had that conversation tucked in the back of my mind. Fast forward about 6 months and I find out we’re expecting our first and I replay that cloth diaper conversation I had oh so many months back. It sounded easy enough, but where to start, where to buy and how to convince the hubs that it was a great idea. I had to convince myself first, and with a few clicks on the internet I was sold. I was a bit overwhelmed with the choices of diapers, covers, detergents, and online stores…but I wanted it badly enough and began researching and asking questions. There was no turning back, we would have a cloth diapered baby.

I compiled all of my information and started practicing the speech I would recite to my husband. He’s technical, I knew he’d want the dirty details about cloth diapering. I was prepared for the “NO WAY” response. But to my surprise he entertained my idea. It started a little something like this.

Me: JPW I’d like to cloth diaper our baby. I’ve been doing a lot of research and it’s good for the environment, our baby’s butt and it’ll save us money.

JPW: Save us money? How will it save us money?

I didn’t need to go any further I had him hooked. It was that easy. I outlined how it would save us money and continued on with my plethora of information on cloth diapers. I won’t bore you with the rest of the research I found, because most likely if you read this blog then you already know all the benefits to cloth diapering…but here’s the best part…

He got so into cloth diapering that he made a video (with me) on the different cloth diaper folds; compliments of this blog! JPW became a cloth diapering fanatic and couldn’t wait for BabyW to arrive so we could use all of the cloth diapers. she was a tiny little thing and I hadn’t planned on having a preemie diaper stash on hand so it was a few weeks in before she was exclusively cloth diapered and every day he’d ask, “will the diapers fit her now?” and about 3 weeks in she was wearing her first prefold, folded and secured by JPW.

Nearly 6 months in we have quite the collection and JPW gets more excited than I do with the new covers and new diapers that arrive. Our newest purchase is a diaper sprayer, since Ryann will start solids next week, we’re preparing for her new poops and he’s stoked to hook it up and try it out. He loves learning about the new styles and has quite an aversion to disposables now. We traveled and opted to go with “green” disposables and he hated every diaper change and blow out. We’re spoiled with zero blow outs and one wipe changes, because with my homemade cloth wipes we rarely need more than one.

JPW is working on putting together an excel spreadsheet to prove to everyone how it does indeed save us money. Remember I said he’s technical? Well he’s so excited to finally prove to everyone that we are indeed saving money, the environment and our baby’s butt.

Thank you for the visit and hospitality.