Living Cheap with a Baby - the Diaper Edition

I don't know about you, but I have always heard that babies are soooo expensive.... Since I reached my twenties I have heard parents tell horror stories about the cost of infants - everything from clothes to formula and how the average family just can't afford to do it anymore. Well, as the parent of three children, I can tell you that doesn't have to be the case. (Anyway, they don't get really expensive until the get to school and they start selling cookies or bringing home fundraiser pamphlets!)

To that end, I will publish a weekly column about "Living Cheap with a Baby." I am more than happy to share what I have learned. Let's start with diapers.

I used disposables for my first two kids, mainly because I didn't consider other options. If your baby goes to daycare, chances are you will have to invest in some disposables because they won't want to deal with cloth diapers. If you find yourself in that situation, be sure to cruise the coupon websites like coupon.com for coupons. Also, look for weekly sales at supermarkets and drug stores. Often the coupons can be substantial - for $2 or even $5 off.

You can also try a warehouse club. They won't take coupons, but in my area Sam's Club sells cases of diapers (equivalent to 2 jumbo packs) for $34. That is about a $6 savings. The drawback is the giant box o' diapers in your nursery, but it is worth it.

As an aside, I would not recommend buying generic diapers. If you have found a good brand, let us know, but I have never encountered a store brand that didn't leak or give my girls a diaper rash. (Generic wipes are fine, however.)

The best option if you can do it is to buy cloth diapers. It involves a bit of an investment at the start in that you will have to buy the diapers. I bought Sun Baby diapers on E-Bay - I got 24 diaper covers and 48 liners (about a 2 day supply before washing) for about $120. In 2 1/2 months these diapers paid for themselves and I can use them until JP is around 2 years old and is ready for pull-ups because they are adjustable.

The diaper sprayer cost about $10 on E-Bay. A diaper sprayer hooks onto the water line on your toilet and is used to spray solids and urine into the toilet. Then you toss them aside to be washed. The sprayer is optional, but it is worth it because it keeps the diapers from staining and from smelling bad while they wait to be washed. If you buy one, get a chrome or stainless steel one because the plastic ones tend to crack under pressure and leak.

If you decide to use cloth diapers, I have some helpful tips.

1. When you are out and about, bring a plastic bag (preferably a resealable one) to store the soiled diapers. This won't work for long trips for obvious reasons, so you may have to buy some disposables if you are going away for more than a day or so. Either that or find a laundry-mat.
2. Bring extra onesies because cloth diapers do tend to leak a bit more.

You will have to wash your cloth diapers separate from your other clothes. There are many different variation on how to wash cloth diapers, but here is what works for me: use half the normal detergent and hot water. The hot water is necessary to get rid of bacteria. Do not use pure soap or fabric softener because they tend to repel water. Then, dry them on your hottest setting (again, bacteria).

Eventually soap residue does build up. For this reason, many people prefer to wash their diapers with vinegar instead of soap, but in my experience they don't get clean that way. When I find that mine are losing absorbency I wash them without soap in hot water twice. That usually is enough to remove the residue.

The drawbacks of cloth diapers are that they are adjustable but at some stages the fit isn't perfect. As a result, the baby might leak out of the leg holes. Generally it isn't an issue once the baby is past 10 lbs or so, but it happens.

Also, because cloth diapers are a little bulkier, it can be difficult to tell if they are wet or not. My son also can readily pee out of even a premium disposable, so we have to check him every hour or so to make sure he didn't wet his diaper. The good news is he has never gotten a rash off the cloth diapers.

The benefits are so large, however, that for many parents, including me, they outweigh and disadvantages. In 2 months these diapers paid for themselves - I figured they will save me well over a thousand dollars in just 2 years! That is a LOT of money!

Further, they are much kinder on the environment. This gem came from the Clean Air Council:

Diapers: An average child will use between 8,000 -10,000 disposable diapers ($2,000 worth) before being potty trained. Each year, parents and babysitters dispose of about 18 billion of these items. In the United States alone these single-use items consume nearly 100,000 tons of plastic and 800,000 tons of tree pulp. We will pay an average of $350 million annually to deal with their disposal and, to top it off, these diapers will still be in the landfill 300 years from now. Americans throw away 570 diapers per second. That's 49 million diapers per day.

Incredible!!

So that concludes the diaper edition of Living Cheap with a Baby. If you have comments or ideas, post them here or e-mail them to us at living.cheap.lone.star@gmail.com.