Blowing in the wind

Confession: Gabriel spent his first week-and-a-half or so in disposable diapers.  The idea of bringing our cloth diapers into the hospital crossed my mind briefly  while we were there, but there was too much going on for it to be a very serious thought.  Then, though it went against my green judgment, I brought the remaining package-and-a-half of disposables home with me, rather than leave them at the hospital for the next baby.

We used the disposables for the first few days at home, because it was easier to keep them away from the healing umbilical stump.  The disposables ran out before the stump fell off, but I was ready to call it quits, so we made the switch.

Right now,  we have a somewhat random assortment of second-hand diapers from a friend and some new organic cotton prefolds that we received as gifts.  We’re mostly using the old-school plastic pull-up covers (which my family called pack-a-leaks) right now, but I am interested in some of the new fancy covers because I think they’re more breathable.

Washing the Diapers
For the first few weeks, this task fell entirely to Matthew, given my recovery restrictions on stair climbing and lifting.  Now I’m helping out a bit.   We wash a small load (which is almost all of our diapers) every two days, warm wash, cold rinse.  At the moment we’re using a liquid detergent called Planet.

After washing, we hang the diapers outside to dry, and the sun does its thing.

I’d read that the sun was great for naturally bleaching poop stains out of diapers, but I really had to see it to believe it.  I need to do a little research to figure out how this works, but the results are quite impressive.

The line drying does leave the diapers a bit crunchy compared to the dryer, but Gabriel doesn’t seem to mind too much 😉