renewed commitment

After spending $130 on disposable diapers during the month of September (about a 6 week supply for 3 kids, if I use no cloth diapers), I have renewed my commitment to cloth diapering. And truly, the bags and bags of diapers that go into the dumpster really do bug me.

Before Reggie came along, I was using cloth diapers on Lydia probably 80% of daytime hours (I always use disposable at night). Brett grew out of my favorite "one-size through potty training" variety about 6 months ago. I have a few lesser-liked options for him, but was probably consistently only using an average of 1-2 cloth diapers a day with him.

With Lydia being so small, I didn't feel it was worth the investment of purchasing larger-size cloth diapers for Brett. Good ones that I like run about $16-18 each. Multiply that by maybe 12 and you're investing over $200 on diapers that potentially only one child will wear for hopefully only for a year or so. In hindsight, I wish I had made the investment a while back, because at the rate Reggie is growing, I will need larger diapers for him as well.

What I did not anticipate when I made the decision to primarily cloth diaper my children was that I would have three children in diapers at once. I figured I would invest the money in a stash of diapers suited for one child (12-16 to wash every 2-3 days) and basically that would diaper all my children.

So, do I scrap the idea? Do I just cloth diaper one of three children? Or do I bite the bullet and invest in a huge stash of diapers - enough to "cover" all three. While I don't think I will ever have a nice supply of 45ish of my favorite diapers, I'm going to try to work my way up to 10 suitable diapers per child. I purchased 2 brand new of my favorites for Reggie, 3 gentle used diapers that would work for Brett, and a couple gently used "one-size"types for Lydia.

Yesterday was my trial run. I cloth diapered all three kids all day with the exception of Brett during his nap, and at the end of the day, I had one diaper per child left.

So I already average 2 loads of laundry a day. Do I really want to wash a load of diapers every day? I'm hoping to find some more bargains.