Adventures in Cloth

Lately, my life revolves around, not only the baby, but doing laundry. Literally every day. I am not complaining, well sort of, but honestly I love it and it is not difficult.

I want to share our cloth adventure because as I was deciding to go cloth and researching it on the internet I couldn't find and exact routine of how someone would cloth. There are many ways to do it so I figure I would share ours and hopefully it might help someone.

To start, we acquired about 25 Bumgenius 4.0 diapers. We also have 2 Bumgenius Elemental diapers that I bought just to try one of the other cloth diapers they offered.

Because we don't have an extremely large amount of the diapers I find myself doing laundry just about every day. The only way this is works out for us is (1) I am not working and (2) Our utilities are included in our rent because we have solar, one of the many perks of living in the sunshine year round. If we were living somewhere that we had to pay our utilities I would probably go ahead and buy more cloth diapers so that we wouldnt be doing laundry every day and more like every other day.

 I didn't do anything fancy to come up with my diaper pail. We went to the store and picked up one of these buckets with a lid and voila! I originally started out with filling the bucket 3/4 of the way with water (wet pail). This became to heavy for me and honestly too messy when I am loading them into the washer. Though wet pailing does help with the stink.

For now, we dry pail. I just pull out the inserts and fold over the shell of the diaper and finished! No fuss, no muss. I know it is time to launder them once my pail fills up. This being about 19 diapers leaving me with 6 or so fresh ones to use while cleaning and air drying them. If she has a wild day and is going like crazy and I run out while they are still drying then I always have a few disposables on hand just in case.

I do want to point out that I am breastfeeding and because breastfed baby poo is water soluble I do not use my sprayer to rinse off her doodie. No need. But we do have the Bumgenius Sprayer for once she starts incorporating solids and we most likely will go back to using a wet pail because solid poops are real stinky.

Since I have already taken out my inserts I literally just dump the pail into the washer and do my first load. Cloth diapers take about 3 loads to wash. I know, that is a lot of water!

The first load is just cold water on the largest setting- no detergent. The second load is hot water and I add 2 scoops of detergent. I have been using Rock'n Green Detergent. So far, so good! Then for the third,  I just do a rinse/spin cycle and finally finished. Once a month I do add 1/4 cup of bleach to the hot load to help with smell and stains. I feel like the sun does this but it is suggested by Bumgenius.


 I put the inserts in the dryer on low heat and hang the shells outside in the sun and air to dry. It is truly amazing the power the sun has to fight stains and even odor. After being in the sun, stains are gone!

Once they are all clean, I bring them inside and Alex helps me set them up for the next use. Stuffing and folding, stuffing and folding.