Frugal Friday 7 - Diapers

Recently I had a phone conversation about Lila's birth with one of my dear friends (that will remain unnamed) that went like this:

"I've come to learn that a lot of my friends are weird hippies.  Like they want to do water births and such.  I'm so glad that you and Justin aren't weird hippies."

Well, I hate to break it to you, but we are weird hippies in one respect.  We are doing cloth diapers.  Yes, you read that correctly.

Are we doing it because it's green and hippie-like though?  Nope,  it is purely a financial decision!  One that I was not originally on board for and Justin was all about.  He was really trying to convince me, but I was not down with putting poopy diapers in our washing machine.

Then one day I remembered that I may have read something about cloth diapers on my favorite blog, Young House Love.  I went to their site and searched for cloth diapers.  Yep, they use them!  And they break down their entire system and then wrote an update post a year and then two years later to report on how it was still working for them and how the diapers were holding up.  See the post here. I also learned about a crazy contraption called a "diaper sprayer," that you hook up to your toilet and you can rinse the poopy diapers.  The diaper sprayer was kind of what sold me, because it solved the whole problem of poop in the washing machine.

Basically, we set up our system just like YHL.  We ordered the same adjustable cloth diapers that will grow with Lila, the same washable wet bags, the diaper sprayer, the detergent they recommended, and we installed a clothesline on the pool deck.  Living in Florida makes line drying so easy and the sun bleaches so the diapers are looking brand new still.  The detergent, Charlie's Soap,  is awesome and we started washing all of our laundry with it.

We also ordered newborn cloth diapers, but we had to wait until Lila got a little bigger to start using them, which was probably around the 2 1/2 week mark.  You can check out the bumGenius diapers at cottonbabies.com.  We got the Elementals and the Newborns. We are still using disposable when we run errands and overnight.  The amount of disposable diapers we are going through now (3-4 max a day) compared to when she was first born (12-15 a day) is craziness!  We are saving mad money.  We did an estimate before we bought the diapers, and even after the initial set up cost, we are still going to save $1400 over two years.  It was pretty much a no-brainer after we calculated that.  And I'm happy to report that cloth diapering is much easier than I thought it would be!

Here's a picture of our diapers drying on the line:

There you have it.  We full on admit and embrace our frugality, judge us as you will.