Knicker Nappies

Around Christmas time, when Erin was about 8 months, I learned just how far cloth diapers have come since I was a baby. They are pretty expensive per diaper, but if you get everything you need when they're born, you will save around a thousand to two thousand dollars compared to buying disposables for 2 to 3 years. Also, you will keep close to 10,000 diapers out of the landfills. And that's just for one child.

At that time I looked into it a little online, but it was confusing with all the choices and also coming across negative reviews. So we decided not to do it with Erin.

Then about a week ago I came across an ad for a store that sells them in Knoxville. So we decided to go for it since we could talk to an actual person about it face to face. We'll still save a lot of money since we're about a year away from potty training. We ended up going with Knicker Nappies.

Today is my first day using them on her. They are really soft on the inside and have absorbent inserts to catch the pee. The first one she wore ended up leaking. I just need to get a sense as to how long she can wear one. They need to be changed more often than disposables (and it's hard for me to tell when the cloth diaper is wet). It'll be an adjustment.

I mostly wanted to write about this to encourage my new mom friends (or soon-to-be new moms) to consider this. Even if you've started out already with disposables, you can switch over anytime - unless of course you're kid is 2, which it probably is too late.

Here is a link to the store where I got the diapers: they explain why you should use them. This quote is pretty convincing for me:

It is estimated that roughly 5 million tons of untreated waste and a total of 2 billion tons of urine, feces, plastic and paper are added to landfills annually. It takes around 80,000 pounds of plastic and over 200,000 trees a year to manufacture the disposable diapers for American babies alone.

So anyway, we've decided to do our small part.