See You Later Huggies...

The other day I decided to take a looky-loo into the linen closet (just the fancy name I call the non-fancy closet in my upstairs hallway) and take inventory of my diaper stash. I had tons of overnight diapers for my five year old son who still wets the bed (I splurge on them because pull-ups make him feel like a baby) and not too many baby diapers.

photo credit

What a shock it was because I usually have a butt-ton of diapers. I swear when we moved here in the middle of July my husband was chastising me for all of the damn diapers he had to schlep from our old house to our new place. The deals for diapers just have not been plentiful and my motivation for finding deals for things that get pissed in and then thrown away have been non-existent.

While at work on Saturday I went onto Amazon to buy a big box of diapers and was not too happy with the prices- I am a ten cents per diaper kind of girl and the lowest price I could find anywhere was sixteen cents, which was for generic diapers which I have never used before. You know what I said to myself? I said screw this, I am going to go back to cloth diapering.

I cloth diapered my son for a about a year (from when he was a little over one until he was almost two) but ended up quitting- I was pregnant with my daughter and we lived in an apartment that I had to go down to the basement to do laundry so it became too much of a pain. Plus I began to coupon like a mad woman at the time so I was able to get diapers for super cheap and sometimes even free. I sold off my stash that included flats, prefolds, various covers, Happy Heinys and Bum Genius and that was it.

Recently, Amanda at Babies and Bargains decided to cloth diaper the baby she is expecting and that put the whole cloth diapering idea into the back of my mind. Then when I saw how much diapers cost I was sold on trying it all over again.

I am strictly doing it to save money so I am avoiding at all costs being sucked into buying tons of cute diapers- it is hard because I have zero willpower but I keep telling myself that I want to spend as little as possible. I decided to go with prefolds with diaper covers because it is the cheapest option; I bought four Econobum Trial Packs from Amazon for $11.95 each and bought three Alva Baby pocket diapers for $4.59 each. I also bought six doublers to add extra absorbency at night. I figure this should be good for now to diaper my ten month old daughter and also diaper my three year old daughter at night (she doesn't usually need one but I'd rather be safe than sorry). If I need more maybe I'll buy a couple more of the pocket diapers.

All in all I've spent about $50 on my diapering needs (I had $25 in rewards points from our Amex card that I used at Amazon) and after doing the math I will have saved us $650 if the baby wears diapers until she is two and a half, but most likely she'll wear them until three because that is about when my other two kids were potty trained (I based this on each diaper costing sixteen cents and using seven diapers a day).

As far as laundering goes I am going to use Charlie's Soap. I used it on my son's cloth diapers back in the day and I now use it for all of our clothing. Using it for everything means that I won't have to worry about residue from non cloth diaper friendly detergent building up on my diapers. Washing the diapers will be so much easier this time because we have our own washer and dryer, plus I do laundry 24/7 anyways so another load every couple of days is no dig deal.

I should be receiving my prefolds today so after prepping them I'll be good to go on my path to saving a  bit of money. Now if only I could not spend a bazillion dollars at the grocery store I'd be all set...