Diapers: Disposable vs. Service

[Greg Hiscott]

We are expecting to have our first child in January 2004. Can
anybody provide information regarding the pros and cons to each
of these two diapering methods?

We are interested in first person experiences.

Thanks in advance.

[dragonlady]

In article >,
Greg Hiscott > wrote:

> We are expecting to have our first child in January 2004. Can
> anybody provide information regarding the pros and cons to each
> of these two diapering methods?
>
> We are interested in first person experiences.
>
> Thanks in advance.
>

I used a service for all three of my kids, and was very happy with it.
I grew up changing cloth diapers and washing them at home (I had much
younger siblings) so diaper pins didn't throw me at all, though I
understand there are some new things on the market that eliminate the
need for them. I had to teach some of my kids babysitters how to diaper
a baby with cloth diapers, as it is not something everyone knows how to
do.

I used them primarily for ecological issues, though I think it was also
cheaper than disposables. (Washing wasn't a viable or economic option,
as we lived in an apartment and didn't have a washer/dryer -- coin op it
gets REAL expensive to wash diapers!) However, I don't think you can
beat the convenience of having someone come by your house once a week to
haul away all the dirty ones and leave a stack of clean ones in their
place! The only time I had a problem with diaper rash, the diaper guy
tested the ph of one of the wet diapers, and after that brought diapers
that had a final rinse that neutralized whatever the problem had been.
One of the two services I used even had training pants, so I could
substitute 1 pair of training pants for 2 diapers when my kids got to
that age. Finally, there was multiple-insurance if we ordered in
advance: when we unexpectedly had twins, we were able to double our
order for $2 a week!

It's been a long time, but if I had it to do over, I would definately
use a service again.

meh
--
Children won't care how much you know until they know how much you care

[Karen G]

I did a cost comparison while pregnant with my third. In reference to
west coast pricing of diaper service, even if I constantly used cloth
diapers from a service the cost exceeded the cost of the name-brand
disposable diapers (Huggies Ultratrim, Luvs, Pampers Baby). The
service/delivery fee is where the problem arose. For twins (where you
are getting more diapers per delivery) the scale tipped the other way.
Washing your own cloth diapers also tipped the cost scale toward cloth.

On a subjective note, I did not like handling cloth diapers. I took
care of a two month old boy for 8 hours each day for about 3 weeks. His
mother chose cloth diapers and I was happy to try it--particularly since
I was 2 or 3 months pregnant with my third child. Boys make the diaper
completely wet where you handle the clips/pins. I don't think I have
every touched the "wet" part of a disposable diaper. The T-shaped clips
make changing the diapers much easier. The covers make cloth diapers
virtually leak-proof, but only if the particular covers fit your baby.
Another subjective issue I ran into was keeping the wipes separated for
trash. I suspect that washing your own and using cloth wipes would
resolve that problem.

So, I stuck (every pun intended :-) ) to disposables for the third time.
Ironically, after using Luvs with my first two children, I have used
Huggies Ultratrim with my third. Luvs and Pampers both contain Aloe
Vera in their liners, which my third is allergic to.

Karen G

[just me]

"Greg Hiscott" > wrote in message
...
> We are expecting to have our first child in January 2004. Can
> anybody provide information regarding the pros and cons to each
> of these two diapering methods?
>
> We are interested in first person experiences.
>


I used cloth diapers for the first year, disposables thereafter. I think if
I had had someone to talk me through the problems I was having at the one
year mark I would never have gone to disposables, but that water went under
the bridge some time ago.

I liked using cloth. They were less expensive, among other things and
didn't add that much to the laundry load. For the first month I had a
service [baby shower gift]. They were fine. The diapers were always clean,
on time, and they provided more than enough. When I switched to caring for
them myself it wasn't much more work, just two loads a week on average. I
already had the supplies as I'd bought diapers and rubber pants prior to
receiving that lovely gift.

After I switched to disposables I found they were quicker to change. They
were portable. The laundry didn't seem to change, either, but, hey, that's
life! I suspect that DS and many other children these days show interest in
potty training at a later age than the generation of the 1950's [cloth
diapers] mainly because disposables remove the wetness from contact with the
skin and they are not as aversive to wear as the child ages. But, that's
just my theory, for what it's worth. The main drawbacks of the disposables
were cost, trying to figure out what DS fit into *now* as opposed to last
shopping trip, and occasionally encountering shelves that were out of the
brand I wanted in the size I wanted.

Cloth has changed a great deal in the last 8 years. The wraps are better,
more likely to work well, and much easier to manage than pins [I ultimately
used pins, not wraps, due to cost of wraps]. They tend to even the edge on
speed of changing baby, and with an active wiggler/toddler that becomes very
important. You want to get more current info from those using them now as
my info is outdated on the wraps.

Personally, if I was having another baby, which I'm not, I'd go for the
cloth again, after getting more current information and finding someone who
could coach me on folding and keeping baby dry as baby gets larger and very
mobile. then again, I also like hanging out my laundry to dry. Some people
think that's weird, too.

-Aula

[Marijke]

I used both.

With child #1, I used my own cloth diapers at home during the day but
disposables at night and when we went out (didn't feel like carrying around
wet, dirty diapers). The system worked very well for me and I never ran out
of diapers because I always had cloth on hand. Laundry wasn't a big issue at
all, thrown in a load of diapers every other day, end of story.

With child #2. I used a service for the first three months as that's when I
did find the laundry to be a bit overwhelming, the newborn diapers that just
get changed again and again and again.... But, we still used disposable when
we went out. I then reverted to child #1 system.

With my last one, #3, we used mostly disposables and I honestly can't tell
you why. I did use cloth, but not to the same extent as the other two, but
it wasn't because disposables were easier, it just kind of happened.

good luck with which ever you choose,
Marijke, in Montreal

"Greg Hiscott" > wrote in message
...
> We are expecting to have our first child in January 2004. Can
> anybody provide information regarding the pros and cons to each
> of these two diapering methods?
>
> We are interested in first person experiences.
>
> Thanks in advance.
>

[Scott Lindstrom]

Greg Hiscott wrote:
> We are expecting to have our first child in January 2004. Can anybody
> provide information regarding the pros and cons to each of these two
> diapering methods?
>
> We are interested in first person experiences.
>
> Thanks in advance.
>

We did everything -- service to start with, then cloth,
washing the diapers in our washer. And we used
disposables at night.

DS especially was able to soak completely and thoroughly
a double-diapered cloth wrapping. Disposables kept him
dry enough that he would sleep through the night.

The service was okay, but we thought it was more
expensive than doing our own washing -- not a
viable option for all, I realize. We probably would have
opted for the service over disposable only.
When DD was in diapers, we lived in a rental,
with no *ahem* legal washing machine (long story),
and I we used disposables. They are still
decomposing somewhere in a dump in Rhode Island.

Scott DD 10 and DS 7

[Rosalie B.]

x-no-archive:yes Greg Hiscott > wrote:

>We are expecting to have our first child in January 2004. Can
>anybody provide information regarding the pros and cons to each
>of these two diapering methods?
>
My experiences are longer ago than anyones, but they are personal for
all of that.

My mom thought that a new mom shouldn't have to worry about washing
diapers, so she would always give at least a month of diaper service
where possible. And where possible (i.e. it was financially possible
for us and it was available where we were living), I continued the
diaper service for at least a couple of months.

After that, I usually washed my own cloth diapers. For some of the
time I didn't have a dryer so I had to hang them out on the line to
dry, and that did take time and some management of weather. (They
don't dry very well when it is raining<g>). I also used mostly
un-prefolded diapers - just rectangular gauze diapers that could be
folded any number of ways to fit any size or configuration of child.

I liked the cloth diapers so much better than disposables - I'm
totally not freaked out by touching a wet diaper or rinsing a dirty
diaper in the toilet or any of that stuff that folks complain about,
and never minded the smell much either. YMMV

Of course at that time disposables were in their infancy, and weren't
anything like they are now (neither apparently are cloth diapers).
The closures were often not secure for instance. I did use
disposables when I was traveling for the reasons noted because I
didn't want to carry a dirty cloth diaper around with me.

I used rubber or plastic pants over the diapers almost 100% of the
time. When the children were potty training, they wore training pants
which were very thick (about 1/2 inch) regular cotton pants. There
was no such thing as pull-ups. IM totally without personal foundation
O, pullups aren't really a good advance over the old method.

grandma Rosalie

[Penny Gaines]

Greg Hiscott wrote in >:

> We are expecting to have our first child in January 2004. Can
> anybody provide information regarding the pros and cons to each
> of these two diapering methods?

I changed to a diaper service with my third when she was about a
year old. I used wraps, which did up with velcro (no pins needed).
It was slightly more complicated then disposables, but not much.

The least convenient thing was that if you change a disposable when you
are out, you can dispose of it. With a cloth diaper, you need to bring
it home again.

--
Penny Gaines
UK mum to three

[Kevin Karplus]

In article >, Greg Hiscott wrote:
> We are expecting to have our first child in January 2004. Can
> anybody provide information regarding the pros and cons to each
> of these two diapering methods?
>
> We are interested in first person experiences.

We used a diaper service for about the first year, then bought a stack
of the diapers from the service and started washing them ourselves.
We used disposables when we traveled, and found them to work about as
well as cloth, but disposing of them in the trash bothered us. It is
environmentally unsound and unsanitary. The disposables were much
more expensive than washing cloth ourselves, and slightly more
expensive than the diaper service.

The diaper service was definitely worthwhile for the first few months,
as we had a baby that never seemed to want to sleep. We did not get
enough sleep to deal with huge laundry loads. We could have switched
to washing our own sooner than we did.

The diapers we used were shaped and had plastic snaps---as easy to use
as disposables. I believe that they were custom made for the diaper
service we used, as I have not seen such good cloth diapers for sale
in the catalogs. We did get cloth diaper covers also---I forget the
brand now.

We ended up using the cloth diapers longer than we had originally
expected (late toilet training), and they eventually fell apart due to
chlorine bleach damage to the cotton fibers.

One other thing we did was to get about 2 or 3 dozen small washcloths
(all right--we didn't buy them, we cut up and overcast a couple of old
Stanford towels left over from my grad school days), so that we could
wash the baby's bottom with warm water using a clean cloth each time.
We have a counter in our bathroom between the sinks, and we converted
that to a changing area, so that we had warm water readily available.
We used "wipes" when outside of the house, but found them much poorer
at getting the baby clean and comfortable.

--
Kevin Karplus http://www.soe.ucsc.edu/~karplus
life member (LAB, Adventure Cycling, American Youth Hostels)
Effective Cycling Instructor #218-ck (lapsed)
Professor of Computer Engineering, University of California, Santa Cruz
Undergraduate and Graduate Director, Bioinformatics
Affiliations for identification only.

[Beeswing]

Penny Gaines wrote:

>I changed to a diaper service with my third when she was about a
>year old. I used wraps, which did up with velcro (no pins needed).
>It was slightly more complicated then disposables, but not much.
>
>The least convenient thing was that if you change a disposable when you
>are out, you can dispose of it. With a cloth diaper, you need to bring
>it home again.
>

We used diaper wraps and a diaper service, but when we went out, we put The Kid
in disposables. Best of both worlds. :)

beeswing

[Sue]

I'm a disposable gal and have used them for all three children. I don't
particularly like using cloth or handling them or having to wash all the
time. I use disposables for conveniece. As far as cost, I am sure if you
wash your own then it would be cheaper for cloths, but if you are going to
send them out, I can't really see where there is a savings, but I could be
wrong. Cloth diapers are nicer than they used to be, but for me I am sitll
not into them.
--
Sue
mom to three girls

Greg Hiscott > wrote in message
...
> We are expecting to have our first child in January 2004. Can
> anybody provide information regarding the pros and cons to each
> of these two diapering methods?
>
> We are interested in first person experiences.
>
> Thanks in advance.
>

[Carolyn Jean Fairman]

In article >,
Greg Hiscott > wrote:
>We are expecting to have our first child in January 2004. Can
>anybody provide information regarding the pros and cons to each
>of these two diapering methods?


We used a service at the start with ds #1.

I liked using something reusable that wouldn't fester in a landfill,
and we had a service (no washing machine in the condo, just a common
laundry room) so that made it pretty convenient.

They are bigger under clothes. Also, someone kept forgetting to put
the dirty diapers out for the service...

When Julian started daycare, first part time and then full time by 8
months or so, we pretty much had to switch to disposables. Most
daycares only use disposables. We ended up only using the cloth on
the weekends (we used disposables at night in the hopes he would sleep
better not feeling wet) and it wasn't worth it.

With ds #2, who is on the way, we'll just use disposables.


Carolyn

--
Carolyn Fairman
http://www.stanford.edu/~cfairman/

[Kevin Karplus]

In article >, Carolyn Jean Fairman wrote:
> When Julian started daycare, first part time and then full time by 8
> months or so, we pretty much had to switch to disposables. Most
> daycares only use disposables. We ended up only using the cloth on
> the weekends (we used disposables at night in the hopes he would sleep
> better not feeling wet) and it wasn't worth it.

Both the infant-care (starting at 18 months) and the day
care/preschool that my son went to had no problem dealing with cloth
diapers. It may help that I'm in Santa Cruz, where environmental
issues are important to enough of the population that businesses pay
attention.


--
Kevin Karplus http://www.soe.ucsc.edu/~karplus
life member (LAB, Adventure Cycling, American Youth Hostels)
Effective Cycling Instructor #218-ck (lapsed)
Professor of Computer Engineering, University of California, Santa Cruz
Undergraduate and Graduate Director, Bioinformatics
Affiliations for identification only.

[H Schinske]

wrote:

>When Julian started daycare, first part time and then full time by 8
>months or so, we pretty much had to switch to disposables. Most
>daycares only use disposables.

This is quite dependent on region. Around here a number of daycares will do
cloth. The preschool where my twins went was part of a much larger daycare
system for infants up, and they used cloth diapers. I saw the diaper guy coming
in and out regularly with large loads, so it wasn't just a couple of kids who
were in cloth.

There are some hospitals around here that use cloth, too, I believe, though not
the one where I had my son.

I liked diaper service a lot, but as someone else found it was more
cost-effective for twins than for one baby (I have twins and a singleton -- the
twins were pretty much 100% diaper-service-diapered).

I washed my own for a while with my singleton, but it didn't work out very well
due to a combination of factors -- he was still pooping a *lot* when he was
over a year old, which most babies don't, and we had a changing table far from
the toilet and both of them far from the basement where the washing machine
lived. Plus it was an old washing machine and not a very good one. I have a
nice new one now (Fisher & Paykel, if anyone cares) that I think would have
helped a lot, both in getting the diapers cleaner and in cutting the cost of
washing and drying.

I then went back to a diaper service despite the cost.

--Helen

[dragonlady]

In article >,
(Carolyn Jean Fairman) wrote:



> When Julian started daycare, first part time and then full time by 8
> months or so, we pretty much had to switch to disposables. Most
> daycares only use disposables.

My oldest was in day care from six weeks, but in a private home. One of
the things I looked for was someone who would not object to cloth
diapers. It turned out she took in two infants at about the same time
(both with the same name . . .), and we both used cloth!

meh
--
Children won't care how much you know until they know how much you care