Cloth Diaper Like Your New Age GrandMom!

Traditionally, cloth has been the chosen form of diapering for ages. Cloth diapers of yore consisted of a folded square or rectangle of cloth and were fastened with safety pins. These traditional cloth diapers were made of natural fibers, mostly cotton, and had no stay dry fibres such as fleece, often keeping the baby wet and prone to limited absorbency. But today’s cloth diapers or "modern cloth diapers" focus on keeping the baby dry and comfortable in addition to preventing leaks.

Most grandmas of today have used traditional cloth diapers for their children, and we thought we’ll ask them how modern cloth diapers fare in comparison! Here’s what they said :)

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49-year-old Rajamani Murugesan, a homemaker from Madurai is grandmom to a 4-month-old little girl. She was initially apprehensive about modern cloth diapers as they seemed bulky and required more effort than disposables. Things changed drastically with time and practice. She says "Now I am completely satisfied in using cloth diapers for my granddaughter"

Now that she is so pro-cloth diapering she even recommends that her daughter invests in increasing her cloth diapers stash size to be able to continue cloth diapering uninterruptedly.

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Shanthi Kumar, an enthusiastic 52 year old grandmom from Chennai reminisces about cloth diapering her daughter. She says, "During my days, when I cloth diapered my daughter with traditional langots and dhoti cloth, we had to also use a rubber sheet, in spite of all that there used to wetness till the chest and also my clothes, making nights very difficult."

She is fascinated by the leak-proof feature of modern cloth diapers and feels that they have made her outings with her grandson an enjoyable experience.

"I initially thought modern cloth diapers were hard to clean, but must admit that laundering todays diapers is way easier than laundering traditional diapers", she adds.

She also finds the prints as an added cute factor on her grandson.

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Bangalorean Susheela Srinagesh, aged 66 years is a former headmistress of a government school and has some other perspectives to share about modern cloth diapering.

She loves having her house feeling clean and fresh despite having a little one in diapers. "I completely love the concept of modern cloth diapers, which requires minimal laundry work and also is very safe on the baby’s sensitive skin. I love the fact that my home is free of the typical ‘baby at home smell’", she says

This happy cloth diapering grandmom adds "I feel prestigious to make my granddaughter wear such lovely, useful and hygienic cloth diapers"

How much time do using cloth diapers take on a daily basis? Not as much as you think!

I've been thinking a lot lately on what prevents new parents from trying cloth diapers.

One reason that kept coming up in my conversations with parents was "I don't have the time for it" or basically, that it was going to take a lot of time to do cloth diapering.

So I decided to break it down. How much time DOES it take to do cloth diapers instead of disposable diapers?

Once you've bought the cloth diapers, got the hang of correct fit and correct wash routine (which is a one time thing if you follow manufacturer's recommendations), on a daily basis, I arrived upon this:

1. 30 seconds to rinse each diaper after use. At 6-8 diapers a day, we're talking about a maximum of 4 minutes.
2. 1-2 poop diaper cleaning per day (on average). Assuming 3 minutes per poop diaper cleaning, a max of 6 minutes per day.

So we've arrived on 10 minutes per day.

Now, laundry day.

1. If you are doing machine laundry, like we suggest, you basically have to load the machine, choose settings, add detergent and start the machine. If you have separate cycles in your machine for prewash and main wash, you'll have to choose the settings again. A total of 5 mins at max?
2. If you are doing hand wash, is an estimate of 45 mins fine?
3. Time to hang out the diapers - 5 mins. Time to fold dried diapers - 5 mins.

So if you are machine washing, we are really looking at a total of 10 mins each day + 15 mins on laundry day. Add 45 mins of actual labour and time to those who are hand washing.

If it's a question of time management, or remembering to start the load at the right time etc, you can always set a reminder on your phone for the same time every day to finish up these tasks. For example, set a 10 PM (or any other time) reminder everyday to ensure that the used diapers are rinsed (if they haven't been already) and to load the machine every alternate day.

This doesn't seem like its too much work or time spent in order to keep your baby comfortable, save money and save earth from unnecessary landfill waste, does it?

What do you think? What are your tips and tricks to save time with cloth diapers? How does this compare to the time you spent in using disposable diapers before moving to cloth?

I personally feel like 45 mins of hand washing is a fair bit of work, which is why we officially recommend machine washing.

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