First and foremost, the brand/style matters. We had heard that you should purchase multiple kinds because different styles suit different babies better. Also, as the baby grows, he or she may end up doing better in a diaper that was formerly a piece of shit. Oh, and you gotta have plenty of wet bags. We have three. I plan to get more, too. Wet bags are priceless. (And if you don't know what a wet bag is, just imagine what it sounds like ;) It holds "wet" things). We have several pre-fold diapers (with Snappis) but Stella is WAY too small for those yet. We also have gDiapers, GroVia, Fuzzibunz, Econobum, and some covers by Swaddlebees. Thus far, these are our favorite cloth diapers:
1) GroVia - https://www.gro-via.com/ : we love these. They come in different styles, and you can use all in ones - which are great but once they're dirty, they're dirty. You have to use another. We use the hybrid diapers a lot, and they're fabulous. The hybrids are definitely our favorite. The hybrid diaper does not leak - unlike other brands like gDiapers - and they're durable and can take a heavy pee pee or a blow out shit. Best part of all: you can flush the insert! No stinky baby poo mess!
2) Fuzzibunz - http://www.fuzzibunz.com/ : these are awesome. They're all in ones, and they're soooo soft - literally, fuzzy. They really catch the pee pee and they hold up well for craps, too. They handle the gooey poo really well, and they always come very, very clean. They fit Stella well since they aren't a "one size fits all" kind of diaper. However, that makes them more expensive than the GroVia diapers which can grow with Stella.
The grow with the baby feature is really nice since it saves A LOT of money; however, it does make for one big ass diaper right now. Stella is small, so maybe our girl is the exception. It's very annoying, though, to have this enormous diaper on such a small baby. She looks like she has ghetto booty and most of her clothes fit funny when she wears them. I know they'll pay off in the end, though.
Anyway, that's my bit about cloth diapers. I wash them on the deep clean/sanitize cycle in our washer with a bit of Dreft and then dry them. Sometimes they take a VERY long time to dry, so I hang dry them to be a little more environmentally friendly. They always come super clean, so it's nice to feel like I'm putting a fresh diaper on her.
Stella doesn't mind them at all. In fact, she doesn't show any opinion at this point. We still use disposable at night since she had the monkey butt there for a few days and we didn't want it to get worse. It's all cleared up now (thank you, Desitin), but we don't want it coming back. We also like the disposable diapers at night since we do so many changes. Once she slows it down to only one change a night, we'll swap over to all cloth, all the time.
Well, I'll end with a picture of our sweet girl rocking out in one of them:
That's a Fuzzibunz in Buttercream. She's too stinking cute! :)
I encourage everyone to use them. They save a lot of money, and we only buy a 44 pack of disposable diapers every so often. It also allows us to buy better disposable diapers, too, since we buy them less frequently. We don't have to do any of that crazy bulk-buying stuff. Check out CottonBabies.com for purchasing. It's a great website with lots of great deals. ;)
