So when I was pregnant Mike and I spent a lot of time researching many things, like all new soon to be parents, in particular we looked at diapers – cost and environmental impact. Being Mr. Environmental, he didn’t want to use disposables, I was not opposed to them, knowing full well how hard taking care of a newborn is without the added stress of doing laundry every 2 or 3 days! Apparently what I didn’t know was that you would be doing laundry that often with or without cloth diapers. I won and we decided that we would use disposables for at least the first month. When we came across gpants we thought we had found our solution! Somewhat disposable, somewhat cloth, but 100% environmentally friendly. We optimistically bought a pack to try. When Sydney arrived we discovered that they were too big for her! So for the first few months we stuck with disposables, a battle I had already won. I’ll be honest, I was ready to continue using disposables until she was in underwear, but I eventually ran out of excuses as to why I should not switch, I tried many different ones, trust me. So finally when I was tired of hearing Mike nag me to try them I finally bit the bullet and put Sydney in the gpants. I was not in love like I initially thought I would be, in fact I was disappointed, partly because I had made every excuse in the book to not use them, so I was looking for things and partly because they weren’t a good fit for her body shape. However, after some more research and the discovery of our local cloth diaper store, I was willing to continue ahead.
After visiting the cloth diaper store and seeing all my options and all the CUTE covers I decided to give it another try. So our solution was Thirsties covers with gPants biodegradeable disposable inserts, they seem to fit really well into the Thirsties duo size one. Now we are approaching the next size up and I am a little worried that the size large inserts aren’t going to fit as well into the size 2 Thirsties Duo. However we are very excited that the next size up will have snaps instead of velcro!
As you can see I went from apprehensive about cloth diapers to being a huge advocate for them, assuming that you can find the right combination for you and your baby! I am not a fan however of all the laundry, but we make it work, I found time even when working full time to get them into the wash and dried so that very rarely have we ever had to use a disposable diaper!
The only other scary encounter thus far has been cloth diapers since solids! Not too bad, but not great! Also would like to mention I got a sprayer for the messier diapers, but have yet to use it because Mike still needs to find the time to hook it up to the toilet, we might be potty training by the time that happens
P.S. the added laundry wasn’t too bad, I only have to wash them 2-3 times a week, depending on how large the mess.
Stumbling Through Motherhood 
I heard on Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me that cloth diapers are actually worse for the environment than disposable. I think it has to do with the energy and water needed to clean them. Aren’t there any biodegradable disposables out there?
we use a biodegradable insert that decomposes after 30 days and is actually compost-able, but you still need covers to hold the insert in place and keep the poop in. However, one disposable diaper takes 500 years to decompose, so while the up front cost and impact of energy and water is higher the long term impact is shorter. We should come up with a completely biodegradable diaper! It could be the next big thing!