The Real Poop on Cloth Diapering

Now that we’ve been cloth diapering in earnest for several weeks now, I thought I’d give a little updated feedback. Overall, I’m really happy to have made the decision to cloth diaper. It saves us money in the long run and keeps us from contributing to the tons sposies that go into the landfills every year. Plus, it is really cute and having a varied stash appeals to my innane need to put things in order.

But while I am happy overall, I do feel the need to share some real poop about cloth diapering…

Poop is the enemy

With The Little Empress eating more and more solid food, her poop is getting nastier and nastier. That’s just the reality of it. Breastfed baby poop, while still poop, is fairly unrepulsive whereas solid poop is just plain g r o s s. While you can toss breastfed baby poop cloth diapers right into your dry pail, you can’t do that with solid poop diapers.

Just about every cloth diaper I’ve had says to “shake solids into toilet” which, frankly, is a LOT easier said than done. If you’re lucky (and I usually am not) the poop will fall right off of the fleece lining. In my experience, this is either caused by God’s intervention and/or an alignment of the planets because by golly, I always get some hangers on.

I’ve discovered that I don’t have to get every molecule of poopage off of the liner/diaper but every bit helps. There’s three ways to do this after the “shake solids into the toilet” proves to be unhelpful. (And I truly apologize if you’ve eaten because I know that poop talk isn’t exactly going to help you keep that food down…)

• Scrape it off with toilet paper
  Yes, this is gross. It doesn’t get the job done very well as you’re likely to grind some into the fabric. But like I said, every little bit you get out into the toilet now means less work your washing machine is going to have to do.
• Dunk and swish
  MUCH more grosser than the toilet paper scrape but also much more effective. I’ve gotten a lot of poop off of diapers this way.
• Diaper shower
  After doing the dunk and swish, I’m now waiting for my diaper shower to come in on order.

Keep in mind that if you use water to clean off your diapers, you should plan on washing the diapers within 24 hours which means you’ll likely be doing laundry every other day with this method.

Dirty cloth diapers can REEK.

You thought your sposie diaper pail was bad? Try three days worth of unwashed diapers. If you do use cloth diapers, do yourself a huge favor: use a 13 gallon trash can with a lid and buy a diaper pail liner. Mine is by Wahmies and can easily store three to four days worth of icky diapers, liners and cloth wipes. The lid cuts down on the smell a lot and the Wahmies liner has a hemp tag to use essential oils with. Sprinkling the lot with baking soda also is said to help.

Since I use a pail liner, all I have to do is take the pail liner to the washing machine, turn it inside out and throw it into the washing machine along with the diapers. I never have to touch the diapers. This is good because there IS a strong ammonia smell from diapers that have been sitting for about 3 days. There’s just no getting around it.

More laundry

Most people won’t try cloth diapering because they hate laundry. And I also hate doing laundry though since I have my own washer/dryer, I live with it. If we were still in an apartment without the luxury of an in-apartment washer/dryer, I wouldn’t DARE even consider cloth diapering. With my stash, we do an extra two loads of laundry a week. Not bad and I haven’t seen a significant increase in our energy/water bills either.

However, cloth diaper laundry is pretty time consuming. On the custom cycle that I programmed on our Kenmore Elite washer (includes a soak, an extra rinse and steam cleaning), the cycle can take as long as 2 hours, 40 minutes. Our drying cycle takes 90 minutes on low as well. That’s over four hours of laundry time. YIKES!! I try to start wash loads at night after TLE is in her nighttime diaper and do my best to make sure she’s not wearing the Very Last Diaper Available ™. That way when we wake up in the morning, all I have to do is toss the washed load into the dryer and after breakfast and playtime, I can fold her diaper load during her nap.

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