I just googled “disposable diaper clothes washer” looking for sage advice on how to flush from an entire load of laundry all the mysterious ingredients contained in disposable diapers: polyethylene and polypropylene plastic with bleached paper pulp, AGM (a gelling substance), petrolatum, stearyl alcohol, cellulose tissue, elastic…. Ever wonder what’s in YOUR disposable diapers?

Yeah. A diaper got into my wash today. Yuck. This is just ONE of the many times I wished I’d stuck with cloth diapers. I tried them with my second child, but I gave up too soon. I never did give it an honest try. But if I have another child (gods, I must be nuts to even write that!), I promise to try again! Especially if one of my very favorite people ever hands me down all her handmade diaper covers! (Hi Erica!).

Which brings me to a question I’ve had more than one new mother ask me: how difficult is it to use cloth diapers?

My answer depends on what kind of mother you are. Cloth diapering has come a long way. I’m sure you’ve heard that cloth diapers are better for the environment, but they’re also better for your child. They’re less likely to cause diaper rash on your child because YOU get to choose the detergents, the perfumes that your child is exposed to. Cleaning cloth diapers has become easier, and you can install a hand-held sprayer to your toilet for rinsing the crap (literally) out of the diaper. You can now buy covers that snap over the cloth inserts, so no pins are necessary. The covers come in a huge array of styles and colors, and they’re really easy to use and clean. The initial outlay of cash to outfit your baby in cloth diapers is a fraction of the cost of diapering a child in disposables for his/her entire babyhood. Yes, you have to get bigger diapers and covers as your baby grows, but there is still a sizeable economic advantage to using cloth diapers over disposables. To the environment, to your baby, to your pocketbook.

In terms of ease of use, there’s no way to get even close to the convenience of disposables, of course. But, changing a baby with cloth diapers is just as easy as slapping a disposable on. You unsnap the cover, remove the soiled diaper, put in a new one, close the cover. Cleaning the diapers is a whole different ball game, though. With cloth diapers, a lot of parents I know soak the used diapers in a pail of oxy-clean for a few hours before washing them. So you can’t get lazy and not do the wash for a few days. You have to be disciplined! The maintenance, therefore, is the challenge. And the time outlay. Cloth diapers are more difficult to use than disposables, but the benefits to using cloth are enormous.

And if you use cloth diapers, you won’t have to deal with cleaning out the mysterious matter from your washing machine when you mistakenly throw a disposable one in with the laundry.

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