Our Cloth Diaper Journey: Accessories

So you've made the decision to cloth diaper?  Awesome!  What's your wash routine like?  Where did you get your wet bag?  How are you going to dry your diapers?  What is going to happen if your child gets diaper rash?  Ok don't panic.  I am going to walk through our experiences with all of these questions and hopefully you can learn from our mistakes. 

Wash Routine
Here's another one of those things that differs greatly from house to house.  Every parent thinks that they have the wash routine thing down for the diapers that the use.  And they do.  No one else has your same exact situation - you may have hard water, or well water, etc.  I have learned from having a bad wash routine that once you have something that works then you stick with it.  We have had our fair share of issues.  Leaking, residual smell after washing, ammonia issues, etc.  We have tried about 4-5 different soaps, both liquid and powder.  We have used small company products and the largest cloth diaper detergent on the market today.  We have a top loader washer and neither hard nor soft water.  We have city water and don't get our water from a well.  After all of that, we have finally decided that this routine works for us: 

Dry pail (we flush the poop when it happens & remove inserts before putting them into the pail)

Cold rinse

Hot wash with Charlie's Laundry Powder

Warm soak with Bacout (this cycle includes a rinse)

Line dry

 

The only difference to this routine would be if we are running short on time, then we would throw the inserts into the dryer and still line dry the shells.  We have an inexpensive drying rack that we bought like more than 7 years ago from Bed, Bath, & Beyond.  It's small enough to be used indoors in our laundry room or outside in the garage.  This routine works for us - no smells, no leftover soap, no issues (knock on wood.)  We buy our Charlie's Laundry Powder from Central Market and our Bacout comes from Kroger.  You can find it at a number of stores though.  The Bacout works to kill extra bad bacteria and keeps our diapers smelling fresh. 

Our diaper pail is shown to the right from The Container Store from years ago.  I'm not sure what other people use this for but it works perfect for a diaper pail and fits most Large sized diaper pail liners perfectly.  A diaper pail liner is just as it sounds.  It's a bag that is designed to fit inside of your diaper pail to hold your diapers until wash day.  This prevents you from having to wash your diaper pail everytime you wash your diapers.  It should be waterproof on the inside and some sort of plastic-y feeling material on the outside.  Our current ones have a zipper on the bottom and an elastic drawstring on the top.  When we wash our diapers we dump the entire bag out into the washing machine and put the bag in with the diapers in the wash only.  Never in the dryer.  Our diaper pail liners come from any random company on eBay.  We bought expensive diaper pail liners originally and the waterproof layer on the inside separated and torn apart from the outside layer.  Inappropriate.  I figure that even if they come apart like the other ones that at least we didn't pay as much for them.  I think that we paid about $7.00 a piece for each one.  They come in like a million different colors and prints but ultimately this bag is going to hold dirty diapers; does it really matter what color it is?   Side note is that we wash our diapers about every two days, maybe a few hours outside of 2 days... we don't have enough diapers to wait longer than that and feel comfortable. 

 

 

Outside of the house

So, you got the wash routine down.  How are you going to deal with cloth diapers outside of your house?  I know several people who don't use their cloth diapers outside of the house, or on vacations, or when they visit certain relatives, etc.  We use ours all the time but it's necessary for us with Silas's latex allergy.  We didn't use cloth outside of the house with Isabella because we always had leaking issues with her and didn't want to pack an entire closet full of clothes for us when we went anywhere. 

 

We bought two inexpensive wet bags from Target when we first started our journey and they are still going strong.  I'm not sure what they were called or supposed to be used for but they are perfect for cloth diapers.  We have the kind that only has a pocket for the wet diapers and no separate pocket for dry diapers.  At some point, I will post a blog about our car organization when it comes to kid stuff, but the short of it is that we have a bin in the car that holds clean diapers and a change of clothes for each child.  We only do diaper changes in our car unless we are in places for multiple hours, so we don't need a bag that we can transport easily or anything like that in a diaper bag. 

 

Diaper Rashes

Say it with me: no conventional diaper rash creams are compatible with cloth diapers.  Any use a traditional diaper rash cream with cloth diapers can make the next week(s) of your life a living hell.  I'm not even sure how I would go about telling you to strip your diapers to make them use able again.  You don't want to do anything that will ruin the absorbency of your diapers.  There are some creams marketed as safe for cloth diapers, but I don't use any of them.  We use regular cornstarch baby powder (spare me the lectures please about the insane dangers of baby powder for babies) on our diapers.  Cornstarch baby powder is one of the safe diaper rash treatments for cloth diapers.   

 

I think that this covers the "accessories" for cloth diapers that we have.  If you have questions, feel free to ask.  We learn by questioning what doesn't come natural to use