Twins in Diaper Covers

The best pictures of Miles and Vivienne seem to be when they're just wearing their cloth diapers and covers. 

I love those big blue eyes.

Vivienne is sitting up so well now.

Her fat rolls make me smile.

Eye of the tiger, Viv.  Eye of the tiger.

Happy Babies

Vivienne is doing her best "sprinkler" dance.

The joys of twindom...  learning to share.

Oh, no you didn't!!  Nobody takes my Sophie!!

Two gummy smiles warms a mom's heart.

Diaper FAIL

Something very... um... interesting... happened today.

I was changing Vivienne's diaper before putting her down for a nap.  It gets pretty warm upstairs in our house during the day, so I decided to let her nap in just her shirt and her diaper.  I remember thinking, "Hmmm... the velcro on this diaper cover doesn't seem to be gripping as well as it used to.  Oh, well."  (In retrospect, I should have paid more attention to the little voice in my head.  Always listen to the little voice, Leslie.)


I put my sweet baby in her crib and went downstairs to feed Miles.  While I was feeding him, I could hear Vivienne cooing up in the nursery.  After about 30 minutes, I decided to go check on her.

I peaked through the crack in the doorway.  To my horror, I saw the "business end" of my baby girl covered in poo.  Her feet were in the air and she was showing me her full glory - absolutely covered in poop.  While I was feeding her brother, she somehow managed to take off her diaper and poop all over herself and her crib.

At this point, it's important to remember that we are finally doing solid foods, so this was not your ordinary, run-of-the-mill, innocuous, odorless breast milk poop... this was real poop, and lots of it.  Needless to say, the odor in the nursery was less than pleasant.


I immediately tried to assess the situation.  Is there some optimal way to solve this problem?  Ok.  Vivienne is sitting in a pile of poop.  It's going all the way up her back.  Clearly, I must get this shirt off of her and get her cleaned up.  I don't want to get poop all over the place, so I should probably clean her up in the crib.


As I took Vivienne's shirt off, I realized that the poop was all over her legs and feet and halfway up her body.  It almost looked as if someone had literally just dipped my beautiful girl's bottom half in poo.  Nice.  So I got the box of wipes and started giving her a "wipe bath" with them (all the time wishing I could just use a pressure washer instead).  As I was doing this, of course, she decided to pee.  I thought,"Well, why not?  Go ahead, sweetie.  You might as well just add some urine to the poop party here."


I finally got her cleaned up enough to move her over to the changing table.  Then I took the crib sheet into our bathroom to spray most of the poop into the toilet instead of putting it in our washer.  (Thank God that we installed that sprayer last week!! Seriously!!)


After I cleaned her up, I just let her hang out in her diaper to eat her sweet potatoes.  I figured I might as well wait to put clothes on her so that we only go through three outfits today instead of four. 


This is the most poop I've had to deal with so far.  But something tells me that I will have other larger poop "episodes" in my future...

Diaper Sprayers and Blackout Curtains

While my mom was here visiting, I was able to do so many things that I usually can't get around to doing (or that I just don't prioritize highly enough to get done on my normal days) - things like taking long showers, getting my hair cut and going to a consignment sale.  We also took the opportunity to get a few important things done around the house - cleaning, installing a diaper sprayer and putting up blackout curtains in Miles' and Vivienne's nursery. 

The babies' nursery is very bright in the mornings and during the day.  We have thin wood blinds, and they work ok, but they certainly don't block out most of the sunlight.  About a month ago, I went to Walmart and bought some cheap blackout curtains.  We finally got around to putting them up this past weekend.  The curtains aren't 100% blackout, but they definitely block out most of the light.  Now, the babies' nursery is nice and dark in the mornings and in the afternoons for their naps.  Hopefully, this will help them to sleep soundly.

Because the babies have started eating some solid foods, their poop has gotten a lot more "interesting."  It's definitely more solid and it has a pungent odor that it did not have before.  (When they were only eating breast milk, their poop was mustard colored and had virtually no odor at all.)  Needless to say, it was time to install a toilet diaper sprayer.  It is basically a sprayer much like you have on your kitchen sink, but it's connected to the water supply going into the toilet.  It also has a little hanger that allows us to hang it on the side of the tank when we're not using it.  I got our sprayer free from someone who didn't need it anymore.  After soaking it in a bucket of bleach for an afternoon, we installed it in our bathroom upstairs.  Now, we can spray off the poops before putting the diapers into the diaper pail.  So far, so good.

A HUGE thanks to Mom for all the help over this last weekend.  We miss you already!

Don't Forget the Cover!

Ironically, I wrote a post about cloth diapering yesterday.  Today, I got up and changed both babies' diapers while my husband was out on a run.  (Jason got up at 6 am to run 16 miles.  I would have joined him, but I was willing to take the sacrifice of sleeping in to stay with the babies.) 

As I was taking Miles up for his first nap, I thought his bum felt slightly damp underneath his footed sleeper.  I thought I must be imagining things, because I had just changed his diaper.  When Miles woke up from his nap, Jason was home and he went in to pick him up out of the crib.  Jason mentioned to me that Miles' bum felt a bit damp.  When he opened the sleeper to change the diaper, he figured out why...

I had forgotten to put a cover over Miles' diaper.  I guess I should have read my own cloth diapering post more carefully!

Washing Cloth Diapers

So far, washing cloth diapers has really not been very difficult.  First things first.  We needed two diaper pails - one to keep downstairs (where we spend most of our time) and one for upstairs in the nursery (for nighttime changes).  I bought simple plastic trashcans from Walmart with lids.  I got our  pail liners from Amazon - Kissa's Antibacterial Pail Liners.  They are basically just large, waterproof trash can liners.

These pail liners have worked very well.  When I put the diapers in the wash, I just dump them in the washing machine, turning the pail liner inside out, and wash the liner right along with the diapers.  I also dry them in the dryer with the diapers.  My only complaint about these is that the seams in the bottom were not sewn properly.  After the first couple of washes, the seams came unraveled.  Luckily, my mom was visiting and she fixed them for me.  (Thanks, Mom!)  They were cheap ($15 for 2 liners), so I guess I can't really complain.

When I'm out with the babies, I need something to hold the dirty diapers until I get home.  I use Kushies Wet Bags that I also purchased at Amazon.  When we have a dirty diaper on the road, I put it in the wet bag and pull the drawstring.  It's waterproof and air-proof enough that I've never had any kind of odor problem.  When I get home, I turn this inside out into the diaper pail liner and wash it along with the diapers.

At home, when I change one of the babies' diapers, I just throw the diaper and the cover into the lined trash can.  The babies are currently exclusively breastfed, so their poop is yellow, seedy breastfeeding poop.  Believe it or not, you don't have to clean the poop off before you put them in the trash can.  I remember being very nervous about this, worrying that the pail was going to really stink.  It only smells after a couple days right before we wash the diapers.

To wash the diapers, I bought some Charlie's Soap on eBay.  I bought a 5-gallon bucket, which is enormous!  It's supposed to wash something like 1280 loads, so we should never have to buy detergent again for the rest of our lives.  =)  (But it was a great cost per load, so it was the most economical choice in the long run.)  Charlie's Soap seems to be the most popular diaper soap that I could find online for washing cloth diapers.  I read lots of great reviews for it.  It's hypoallergenic, dye-free, fragrance-free and environmentally friendly.  (Instead of scooping it directly from the ginormous bucket, I scoop it from an old oatmeal container.  It's easier to manage and I spill less of the soap in the process.  I only refill the oatmeal container from the large bucket every few weeks.)  We also use the Charlie's Soap for all of our regular laundry, and I really like it.  It's supposed to be great for sensitive skin.

We wash the diapers every two days, usually in the morning.  You probably wouldn't want to go more than 2 days, because the trash cans would start to have an odor.  On wash day, I turn the pail liners inside out into the washing machine.  First, I do a rinse/soak cycle with cold water.  This cycle is important because you want to use cold water to rinse away the poo (I think warm or hot water will actually set the stains).  Next, I add the Charlie's Soap and do a hot wash.  The hot wash is also important because the hot water helps to disinfect the diapers.  Finally, we do an additional cold rinse (in addition to the cold rinse that automatically happens after the hot wash) to be sure that the soap is completely rinsed away.

I dry the diaper covers and wet bags on a dry rack, and I put the cotton prefolds, cloth wipes and pail lines in the clothes dryer.  The covers usually only take a few hours to air dry.  The prefolds take a long drying cycle to get completely dry.  The heat of the dryer also helps to disinfect the prefolds.  This summer, I would like to try to dry some of our diapers outside in the sun.  I'm not sure whether we'll actually make that happen or not, but I would like to try it.  I hear that the sun is an excellent disinfectant and it helps to remove stains.

So the only real work involved in cloth diapering for us is an extra load of laundry every 2 days.  I would definitely say that it's worth the reduced impact on the environment and on our budget.  (Though our water bill and our electricity bill are higher than they used to be, I still think that cloth diapering, especially using prefolds, is much less expensive than buying disposable diapers.)

As the babies start eating solid foods, we'll be installing a diaper sprayer.  And I hear that the poo gets much more "interesting."  I'll keep you updated.  ;-)

Cloth Diapering Twins

Miles and Vivienne are 6 months old now, and I love cloth diapering my twins.  Not only is it more economic, but it's also more environmentally friendly.

We have managed to cloth diaper them since they were about a month old.  We initially started with disposables, just to make life a little less stressful in the beginning.  Looking back, I really think we could have switched to cloth sooner, because it really doesn't add that much complexity to our lives.

We wanted to make cloth diapering as inexpensive as possible, so we just use the basics here - no fancy all-in-one diapers (though I admit it is so tempting to try them).  In the beginning, I bought a set of newborn prefolds.  Prefolds are basically just old school rectangular diapers that are made from cotton.  (You can get them made from other more interesting materials, but we stick with 100% cotton.)  To learn more about prefolds, check out this website.

After I fold the prefolds around the babies, I need something to hold them in place (especially when they were teeny tiny), so I use Snappis diaper fasteners.  They are easier than diaper pins, and I don't have to worry about poking the babies with a pin.  You can use a prefold without a Snappi, but I always feel like the Snappis give us a tighter fit and help to contain the breastfeeding poop a bit better.

The prefolds themselves are not waterproof, of course.  They's just plain cotton, so they soak up the pee and hold it there, so you need a waterproof cover of some type to go over the prefold and keep your baby's clothes (and your clothes and everything else) from getting wet.  There are a million different types of diaper covers that you can buy to cover prefolds.  I bought a set of covers from a local work-at-home mom, Malia.  Her company is called Bumbledoo, and she makes some really cute products and truly cares about her clients.  I highly recommend checking out her store.

I also bought some Bummis Whisper Wraps from Craiglist and eBay.  Craigslist and eBay are a great way to save money on all kinds of baby stuff, but especially on cloth diapers.  We also have a handful of Proraps, and I like those a lot for our little girl.  And, of course, we use our Bumbledoo covers as well.  I use all of these on a daily basis and I like them all.  They all have either adjustable velcro or snaps that allow us to tailor the size for our babies as they grow.

Now, we've bought larger prefolds as the babies have grown.  We have to experiment with the different sizes to figure out which ones fit which baby best at their different stages of growth.  I've ordered from CottonBabies.com and from Green Mountain Diapers.  I've really liked both online stores.

There are so many different kinds of diapers out there - prefolds with covers, all-in-twos, all-in-ones, contours, and more.  I remember being a little frustrated at first, because I didn't understand all the differences and I just wanted someone to tell me what the optimal diaper is (the engineer in me assumes that there must always be an optimal solution to every problem).  The truth is, each type of diapers has a different level of cost and convenience.  Prefolds, for example, are arguably the least convenient but also the least expensive way to diaper.  All-in-ones are generally considered the most convenient but also the most expensive way to diaper.  I recommend that you buy a few different kinds of diapers and try them out so that you can be sure of which type of diaper is the best fit for you.  (Craigslist is a great way to sample different kinds of diapers and wraps.)  We ultimately decided that cost was more important than convenience, and I don't consider prefolds to be all that inconvenient, personally.

I hope someone finds this post helpful.  I've gotten a lot of questions about how we cloth diaper twins.  It's really not difficult at all.  I enjoy washing my little babies' diapers and feeling like I'm helping to preserve this gorgeous planet that God has given us.

I'm going to write another post later about how we wash our diapers.  Right now, I think I have two babies upstairs who have woken up from their nap and are ready to play with Mommy!

Cloth Diapering

We have started using cloth diapers with the babies.  We started with a few diapers on Monday and then went full force on Tuesday.  So far, it's been really easy.  We just throw the diapers in the wash every night and we're ready to start again in the morning.  We're using basic prefolds with diaper covers (Bumkins and Proraps now, but looking for a few more on Craigslist).

Vivienne really likes her camouflage diaper cover.  She's getting in touch with her "tough side."

We still use a couple disposable diapers at night, because we want to have a nice solid long sleeping pattern down before we do cloth diapers at night.  Otherwise, we'll be changing cloth diapers 4-5 times a night, and we don't need to add any more workload onto our already tiring nights.  (Luckily, the babies have been sleeping for much longer stretches the past 3 nights, so we might take the plunge soon and make the switch.)  

We're also using reusable cloth wipes.  They are basically small fabric squares (flannel in cute little patterns).  I wet it with some water and wipe.  They actually work much better than the disposable wipes.  Who knew?

I really like that the cloth diapers save us money and have less of an impact on the environment.  Plus, they're just ridiculously cute on the babies.  I think it's probably better on their skin, too.