I threw away THREE HUNDRED DOLLARS!

...no, seriously. I threw it away. At least that's essentially what I did the first six weeks of Matthew's life. Let me explain...

The entire time I was pregnant, I said that I would *never* cloth diaper. When Matthew was 4 weeks old, I still said I would *never* cloth diaper. My Mimi taught me one thing about the word *never*...and that was to never say it.

At about six weeks, Thomas and I totaled up all of our diaper costs.

Well, wait a minute. Let me backtrack a bit. When Matthew came home from the hospital, he came home using Pampers Swaddlers. They left him with not just a rash, but a terrible blistering between his little cheeks. We switched diapers several times. We tried Swaddlers Sensitive (same blistering), Target brand (absorbency=not worth junk AND it was blowout central for us), Huggies little snugglers (less blistering, extreme redness), then finally switched to a diaper my sister recommended, the Huggies Pure and Natural. This is just about the least cost effective diaper you can purchase (at least 10 dollars for 36 newborns), but it worked for us. Matthew had a bit more redness than most babies with the P&N, but it was a vast improvement from blisters.

Okay, so back to the story. At six weeks, we totaled up our costs. We were at a whopping 300.00 of diapers that we had given away, not been able to use, thrown away due to crappy quality, or best case scenario used for 2 hours max and then thrown away. We were literally having our son poop on our money. Since switching to one income, I've been looking to save money wherever I can, so after talking to my husband and at least getting him to neutral territory on cloth diapering, I dove into researching.

I was under the impression that cloth diapering was all prefolds and safety pins. Not the case. Did you know that cloth diapering can essentially be the same as disposable diapering? Want to know the difference? You don't throw your money away at the end of the day. I had no idea the options with cloth were so vast. I enlisted the expertise of a few moms I know that have chosen the cloth route for their little ones and then went about buying.

In the first few days, I only had the five diapers that I went to Sweetbottoms Boutique (our local cloth diapering store) and bought. I ended up doing cloth about 1/2 the time and noticed an extreme difference in little M's bottom. The redness was clearing up!!

Three weeks later, I've upped my stock just a bit and while I do wash every day currently, I use at most 1-2 disposables a day and sometimes none at all.

My current stock is:

2 Rumparooz, 4 goGreen, 1 Kawaii, 2 Sunbaby, 1 Rocky Mountain, 1 Wahmies, 6 cotton prefolds for added absorbency

I think that's all the diapers I have right now. They're all pocket diapers, which are SO close to disposable diapering that I've noticed very little difference in my daily routine. Since switching, we've only used about 40 diapers in three weeks and that is including 2 full days of disposable diapering this past week while my husband was having surgery. I'm also expecting a shipment of 12 Sunbaby diapers in the coming weeks which will help immensely.

We've not noticed the savings in our account yet as I'm still trying to build up my stash and figure out what I like. Total costs to date: 250.00 and once my Sunbaby order comes, I'll have enough diapers to do laundry every other day. I could stop buying for 2.5 months and would have broken even with what I would have spent on disposables.

The amazing part of cloth diapering is once it's bought, it's a permanent part of your baby "stuff" collection. With some of the cheaper diapers (5-6 dollars), even if you only get 2 or so months use out of them, they've more than paid for themselves compared to disposables. BONUS: You can use the same cloth diapers for all of your kids, so if you keep your diapers in good condition, diapering baby number 2 can be nearly cost free.

In the coming blogs, I'm going to review the diapers that I've bought so far and some new diapers I'm going to try out. I think my next purchase will be some larger prefolds and a couple of covers. I know, I know...that's what turned me off to cloth in the beginning, but I actually really enjoy it and want to try all types of diapers!

For now, I'll leave you with a picture of little M in one of his diapers!