The Best Bottom

During Holden's second week, we celebrated a milestone that my childless self would have scoffed at. Holden lost his umbilical cord stump, and we started him in his cloth diapers! We have a full set of Best Bottom diapers with snaps and so far, they have been a smashing success. We've been doing laundry about every other day, and while our system needs a bit of refining, it is working pretty well in general.

We are really liking the Best Bottom system; everything feels super secure. Also, I was amazed that, upon starting with cloth, Holden's diaper rash vanished. Pretty cool!

Finally, I've been loving the purse-turned-diaper-bag given to me by Robin's mom. It is a beautiful, beautiful bag and it happens to be big enough to serve as a diaper bag. I loved my Petunia Picklebottom bag that I carried with Lydia, but after carrying a diaper bag for a few years, I was ready to just carry a great normal bag that happened to have diapers inside!

Some of our cloth diapering specifics, for those that are interested:

We have eight shells and eighteen liners. This gets us through two days easily, and we'll see how this shifts as Holden's digestive tract continues to develop.

When diapers or shells are dirty, they go right into a wet bag kept in a drawer in our changing table. As of now with Holden only consuming breastmilk, we haven't found the need to immediately rinse out the diapers. We do have use a product called "Shake It Up" from Rockin' Green in the wet bag to keep smells at bay in the nursery, and it works well. When ready to wash the diapers, we rinse them in the laundry sink next to our washing machine. I'm sure this will evolve as Holden's diet evolves.

We are using Rockin' Green soap, largely because I am a sucker for yummy smells and cute packaging, plus it came highly recommended.

I keep my diaper bag stocked with an extra shell and 2-3 extra liners along with a small wet bag and a handful of wipes.

We are using wipes cut from fleece. I figured if we were washing diapers, we could easily wash wipes also. I'm rethinking the use of fleece, though, and may make some wipes from flannel when I get some time. (Do you think Holden will still be in diapers come 2016?)

On the rare occasion that Holden is showing signs of diaper rash, I toss a fleece liner over the microfiber liners so that we can use diaper cream without clogging up the microfiber. This has worked well, though Holden's skin stays pretty happy with the cloth.

SO far, this is very doable. We'll have to work hard to stay in our routine once I return to work, but I really think we can do it.