Cloth Diapering: A Review

Almost a year ago, I switched my then 10 month old daughter from disposable to cloth diapers. I have had almost a year of using disposables and a year with cloth. I still love my cloth diapers, but have found myself more and more using the disposables. We use Fuzzi Bunz exclusively for Ella. I tried a few other brands, but the Fuzzi Bunz worked best. She learned very quickly how to get the velcro on other brands opened and it was not pretty! As much as I love my FBs, I am relying more and more on disposables for two reasons: bulk and absorbency.

Ella is skinny for her age -- she is tall and light -- and the FBs are very bulky on her. I found often that pants and shorts in her size would not fit around the cloth diapers. I tried going up a size in bottoms, but then pants were way too long and the shorts were loose everywhere except the diaper area. The cloth diapers are definitely bulkier than the disposables. If I use disposables, Ella is able to fit in to a lot of her bottoms from last summer, but with the cloth, they are too small. This may just be Ella's body type and it is not as big a deal in the summer, but it was a huge issue with pants over the winter.

We also had problems with absorbency of the diapers. Ella drinks a lot of water. We live in the desert so I let her drink water whenever she wants it. This leads to a lot of we diapers and they were constantly leaking in the cloth diapers. I finally bought disposables for when we went out of the house for a length of time. We did not have any issues with wet pants after that. I could have added more layers in the diapers (they are pocket diapers) but then we end up with major bulk! For nighttime we were adding extra bulk, but the diapers were so full in the morning, that they'd be hanging off of her and she and her PJs would be drenched. We found that disposables were able to absorb more and we had a dry Ella in the morning.

I still love our Fuzzi Bunz and I use them when we are at home because I can change them frequently. I love saving tons of money and not filling up the garbage dumps. But since I have been able to get diapers at CVS for almost free, I have been using more and more disposables. I also wonder if perhaps because her bladder is getting bigger the cloth diapers may just not be able to work as well as I want them to. We'll stick with them and use them on the next baby for sure and I still encourage everyone I know to give cloth diapering a try.