Now that you’ve read Part I and Part II, you should know all about cloth wipes, diaper pails, and how to wash dirty diapers and wipes.

Part III is about the cloth diapers themselves. When most people think of cloth diapers, they think of large white cotton rectangles which need to be folded and then pinned onto the baby and then covered by plastic pants.

I’ve been cloth diapering my baby for over ten months, and I’ve never used pins. There are safer and easier options for fastening diapers onto the baby now, so I have no desire nor inclination to learn how to use pins. I know a lot of people who cloth diaper that like using them, and I have a lot of respect for those people, but personally, I don’t like the idea of sharp metal objects near my baby.

For those of you who are used to the convenience of disposable diapers but would like to start using cloth for your baby, fear not. There are cloth diapers that are made to be as easy to use as disposables are. They’re called all-in-ones, or AIOs. Sometimes, they’re called pocket all-in-ones, or pocket AIOs. Here are two examples:

I’ve pictured two views: inside and outside, to give you a better idea of what these types of diapers look like. The two pictured here are called Happy Heinys, and they can be found pretty much anywhere online where cloth diapers are sold. I bought mine at Full Circle Baby, a WAHM-owned diaper shop here in Texas.

The great thing about pocket AIOs is that these diapers don’t need plastic pants or diaper covers at all. The waterproof layer is already built into the diaper. That’s why they’re called “all-in-one”s. Happy Heinys are called pocket diapers because they have a pocket which you need to stuff an absorbent cloth into before putting the diaper on the baby. The pocket design was invented to shorten drying time in the dryer. If you use pocket diapers, you need to remember to take the absorbent cloth out of the pocket before you put the dirty pocket diaper and absorbent cloth into the diaper pail. This is a picture of a (clean) pocket diaper already stuffed with an absorbent cloth:

You can use any absorbent cloth, even a shop towel if you want to be thrifty. It won’t hurt anything, though some people claim it’ll increase pilling in the fleece layer (the white part) of pocket diapers. I stuffed the above diaper with a prefold diaper.

What’s a “prefold diaper?” This:

It’s a rectangular diaper made of several layers of absorbent cotton twill folded and sewn together so that the middle layer is thicker than the two side layers. Some people use prefold diapers with a fastener called a Snappi to diaper their babies. Other people use pins to fasten their prefolds. While I don’t have any experience with pins, I have used Snappis. They’re relatively easy to use, but I prefer the ease of Aplix (think: Velcro but much higher quality) and snaps, so most of the time I used fitted cloth diapers or pocket AIOs.

What’s a fitted cloth diaper? A fitted cloth diaper is a diaper with its own fasteners (usually snaps or Aplix) that is contoured and has elastic sewn in the legs and back (and sometimes the front) so that it fits the baby well and doesn’t let any poop explosions out. It does, however, need a cover over it to keep the baby’s clothes (and your own) from getting soggy. Here’s a picture of a fitted diaper:

The above diaper is a Kissaluvs size 0. The upper limit for weight on that diaper is officially 15 pounds, but my almost eleven month old is 20 pounds and they still fit her (on the loosest snap). They are the only diapers we own that we’ve used on her since she was born. Here she is wearing one:

We only wear them around the house for two reasons: (1) they’re not absorbent enough for leaving the house, and (2) I like to be able to know when she is wet immediately so that I can change her diaper as soon as she goes. For this, I put a fitted diaper on her without a diaper cover. This way I can tell she’s wet as soon as she goes, and I change her right then. Often when she’s wearing a cover or pocket AIO (and especially if she’s wearing a disposable, which we have done for travel on an airplane), it’s harder to tell when she’s wet. I’ve made a conscious effort since she was born to try and preserve her innate feeling of cleanliness and dryness by changing her as soon as she becomes wet or dirty so that potty training will be easier for all of us when it’s time.

(If you’re about to tell me about Elimination Communication and how great it’s been for you, please comment with your story. I would love to read it. Know, though, that I’ve researched it thoroughly, tried it and it did not work out for me. I’ve had to pump continuously with a very low supply since the baby was born and I just could not devote the time I wanted to to EC. I did get her to pee in the potty once, after a nap, when she was about six months old, but after that I haven’t had a repeat.)

Stay tuned for Part IV: Leaving the house with cloth diapers

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 17th, 2007 at 1:25 pm and is filed under Cloth Diapers, How do you...?. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.