I had my cart all ready to check out and thought I would call DH just to double check he was ok with the purchase (and mostly to get him to tell me to just go ahead--I have a hard time spending money!) and he was very waffly and said he wanted to talk more about it before I went ahead. This was news to me as I've been talking about doing cloth for months...
Previously, he had said he was on board with CD but he didn't want to do the laundry. I said fine b/c I will be staying at home so will be doing most of the laundry anyway. Now, apparently a bunch of women he works with (some/many of whom tried CDing) are saying we're crazy, we're going to do laundry constantly, it's too hard especially with NB twins, etc. They are saying to at least wait until the babies are 3 or 4 months and aren't going through so many diapers and can fit into one-size.
I'm inclined to ignore them, b/c I am kind of "into" the whole cloth thing now, and we'd end up spending more on sposies for 3-4 months than we would on a NB stash. But I must admit I'm a bit scared. I'm a FTM and I'll have twins. From what I've been told I should be nursing, eating, or sleeping for the first month or two--when will I do laundry? Will it be too much?
So my real question, I guess... if you CDed a NB (or two!!), how did you handle it all? Was adding laundry to everything else too much? Help me convince DH, please!
Re: Help! DH is now balking at CDing NB Twins
I CD my twins, and have from the start (I wrote all about it here). With AIOs and pockets, I really don't see where the hassle is. They go on and off just like disposables. Instead of tossing it in the trash, you toss it in the wetbag. When the wetbag fills up, instead of tossing it in the trash like you would a trashbag full of disposables, you empty the bag into the washer, which does all the work. I don't find stuffing the pockets to be all that oppressive, as I can easily do it while watching TV while the girls are napping.
I'm saving a ton of money over what I would spend with twins in disposables, and I'm not producing literal tons of trash. It's not nearly as hard as people seem to think.
Etta Jane and Claire Elaine are here! Born March 28, 2012.
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What it's like to cloth diaper twins, Part I.
Cloth diapering twins, Part II.
I can't imagine the cost of disposables for twins! That alone would probably sway my DH.
I only have one, but we CDed her right from the start. It was no big deal at all! I see people say often that they don't want to deal with CD laundry while figuring out a newborn, and I honestly don't get it. CDs were the easiest part of having a NB and we have never had a diaper blowout.
Yesterday I asked DH if we needed anything else from Amazon before I completed my order. He said, "more cloth diapers?". I let him pick the print.
My twins are two weeks old. We're using KL0s (H's go-to diaper) and prefolds. We put them in CDs when we got home from the hospital, but quickly learned that my babies are so small the CDs were causing their umbilical stumps to bleed. H had no real concept of how many diapers two newborns go through, so he had to make three random and expensive trips to Target while we waited for the stumps to fall off (only 10 days...I can't imagine paying for 3-4 months of disposables).
H's friends also speculated that we'll give up on CDing, but the money savings just can't be beat. H loves the KL0s because I tell him which snaps to use and he knows the diaper fits right, no guessing. He throws them in the laundry at night, transfers to the dryer in the morning. No biggie, really.
I know it's OT but that would earn DH some serious points. But I don't think that would ever happen for me, ha.
TTC since September 2009.
IVF #2: +HPT 2/6/12! ~ Boy/Girl Twins!!
Mine didn't say anything but I would say getting to the store to get more diapers would have been way harder! I got mostly AIOs for the NB days as I didn't want to deal with too much while changing 30 diapers a day and my husband actually said he "loved" them and I did a good job researching them. And he had changed one diaper one in his life before that.
I washed every day and had enough for 2+ days so I was never rushed. Now that I have sold off my NB stash, I should calculate what I actually spent, but it will be in the tens, not hundreds as it would be by now in disposables. I calculated that in the first month, I would have gone through 1,000 disposables and I couldn't resell those!
Totally doable.
No experience with twins, but CDing one newborn was totally not a problem for me (and I'm a FTM). We didn't even have a tumble dryer for the first few months, and even having to hang everything on the clothesline every second day was not that much of a pain. I'd either do it while she was sleeping or while wearing her in a sling. We used prefolds and covers, so no stuffing necessary - they could just go straight into the closet when they were clean.
And as a pp mentioned - we never had any blowouts using cloth. That alone is an excellent argument for CDing a newborn!