Cloth Diapering and Family Visits

My experience with cloth diapering so far has been very positive and I know my husband would say the same (yes, he changes diapers and does the laundry!). Our families were big skeptics when we told them that we'd be using CDs. I knew all along that I'd love them, I just hate the thought of disposables in a landfill 100 yrs from now. However, it was a little more difficult to get started than I expected. We started using them when our daughter was about 2.5 weeks old. The system that we bought, Softbums http://www.softbums.com/, were a little too big and bulky for her at first. I did purchase some newborn fitted diapers, but I bought a cover that was too big-oops! So, we ended up using disposables at first. When we transitioned to the cloth diapers, they were so easy to use at home, but I was very nervous about leaving home with them. We traveled to visit our parents for Thanksgiving and decided to use disposables for the trip. Since we'd been using the cloth for about 10 days at that point, we found that we didn't like using disposables anymore. I think they smell funny and I feel guilty throwing them away:) We decided that next time, we'd make the CDs work and try to win over our families!


My husband and I just returned after our first trip visiting our parents while using CDs. Overall, it went better than I expected. It's definitely not as simple too do as it is at home, especially when you forget to bring along the detergent. We're using an All-in-two system, so I had a hard time figuring out how many covers and how many inserts to pack. I think we settled on about 14 inserts and 5 covers. I was worried that we'd run out of clean covers, which we did since she has a tendency to get poop on them:)

It was a little tricky figuring out when to wash them since we couldn't follow our normal routine since we didn't bring along enough to wait to do it every other night. In addition, we were going to have to wash them in a traditional machine (we have a front loader at home) at my parents' house. I noticed they did not come as clean as they do when we wash them at home. We normally only need to do one sanitary wash cylce with an extra rinse at home, but one wash/rinse cycle did not work in the traditional machine. I still used them and it didn't seem to create a problem for the short term, but I was sure to rinse them an extra time when we washed them again at home. All in all, it didn't go perfectly, but we'll do it again and perfect our "travel routine". And, I am not going to say that our families see the light when it comes to CDs, but at least they are not adamently opposed to them anymore. I think we showed them that CDs aren't any more gross or difficult to change than a disposable.