Green Adventures Plus Two! Oh And Cloth Diapers Too!

Boy, those "couple of weeks" off referenced in my last post were sure an understatement! That said, I promised to come back so here I am!

First of all, I have to say, I do believe we have got the cutest little twin boys in the world. We are so blessed. And they actually SLEEP! Still, there is little time for much in the way of any fancy sorts of green endeavors. I am still keeping up with our CSAs and love them, but aside from that and the usual recycling my green-ness has been a bit pathetic!

One new effort that is successfully underway though is the cloth diaper experiment. We have been using Do Good Diapers cloth diaper service and it is F-A-B-U-L-O-U-S! Couldn't be easier. Seriously. And adding a few more diapers to cover two babies instead of just one is really only a few more bucks a month. So for little more than the cost of disposables for a singleton, we get enough cloth diapers PLUS the laundering for TWINS! Like I said: F-A-B-U-L-O-U-S!

The process couldn't be easier. Do Good Diapers drops off a set of diapers once a week. We use them, putting the dirty ones in a diaper pail - with the dirty business inside and all . We set them out on the front doorstep the following week for them to pick up and they leave behind a new batch of clean ones. What a cinch!

Now for those of you like this City Girl you might be wondering, "Yeah, but do they work as good as disposables?" "Do they leak?" "Aren't they a pain to put on?" Well, since we used disposables on our singleton and I have experience with both, I'm here to give you the full City Girl scoop.

Pros

1. No more diaper rash (okay there was that once when the twins were sick...)
2. No more poop blowouts - really!
3. Half the price of disposables for twins! Or about the same for singleton! Or even cheaper if you launder them yourself!
4. No guilty conscious about adding to the landfill and no need for that extra large garbage bin you otherwise need during the baby years!
5. Earlier potty training (or so they say - will report on that one in a year or two!)

Cons

1. They do seem to take up more space in the diaper bag (especially noticeable when trying to pack for two!)
2. It takes about 5 seconds longer to put them on.
3. When you're out and about you have to lug the dirty cloth diapers around with you in the diaper bag til you get home.

I have to say, looking at the lists, the pros FAR outweigh the cons! One thing I didn't put on the list because it could be a pro OR a con, is the big-round-cloth-diaper-butt-syndrome. Cloth diapers are much bulkier than disposables. But for us, this is actually a pro! I have no earthly idea how our twins would keep pants on without their big cloth diaper butts. They're so skinny they'd fall right off!

I guess the biggest surprise to this City Girl about using cloth is that it really is not any harder than using disposables. Yes, I am kind of resentful when we're out for the entire day and I wind up with a huge bag of dirty diapers in my diaper bag. BUT compare that to the experience of going through those dirty diaper blowouts we had with disposables? I'll take cloth thank you very much!!!

And I'm just thrilled about the financial savings. Before I began my green initiatives I thought that being green was more costly than not being green. So I'm psyched to find yet another way it actually SAVES me money! Can't beat that, can ya?

If you're like I was and on the fence about whether or not to try cloth, see if you have a local diaper service and if they offer any starter or trial packages. It was a great no-commitment way for us to try things out. We got diaper covers and a diaper pail on loan so we really had to make no investment whatsoever until our package ran out at 12 weeks. By then we were sure we wanted to stick with cloth and had already made an investment in diaper covers that worked better for our little guys skinny legs. Couldn't have worked out better.

To close, I'll share a photo of our happy boys sporting their cloth.