Post contains affiliate links. Night time diapering can be a tricky beast. If your baby is still waking to nurse/bottle feed, you might be changing a diaper at every feeding anyway. If your baby isn’t a heavy wetter, you can perhaps get away with just adding a doubler to a night diaper. For others whose babies sleep longer and/or are heavy wetters, you’ve likely found a solution that keeps baby dry, and you don’t want to stray from it!
If fitted diapers and wool covers are your night time cloth diapering solution, those diapers are probably already set aside, designated for night time use. Typically you’ll be using a thicker, more absorbent fitted and a well lanolized cover.
For others, the best solution is a pocket diaper stuffed just so with a hemp insert or hemp prefold.
Keeping a stack set aside that has been pre-stuffed with your bulletproof combination makes it easy to grab the right diaper at bedtime. Having specific colors or prints that you use every night can make it even easier. We’ve used our Bumgenius artist series as night time diapers for years. This makes it very easy to peek and make sure that yes, I did remember to put a night time diaper on him, and we always know which diapers to grab for bedtime.
So, what are the cons? Well, having a diaper stuffed to the gills puts extra stress on the elastic, as does having the elastic stretched for 10-12 hours while baby sleeps. In addition, these special diaper stuffings can be a little bit more expensive, so you’ll likely only be rotating 3 or 4 of them, meaning extra wear & tear on those diapers.
Of course, results may vary, but this is evidenced in our home by looking at the elastic of our “night time diapers” vs. all the rest. Much more relaxed!
So what’s the answer? Consider choosing a different set of “night time diapers” every time you stuff, and just set them aside in a different stack to grab from. Or, do like we did and use the same few, realizing that their elastic may wear a bit quicker!
Do you have designated night time diapers?
Maria wants to live in a world where cloth diapers are the norm and moms can make parenting choices without judgement. When she’s not chasing her 18, 14 and 11-year old kids around, you might find her checking out the latest gadgets, organizing something (again) or exercising in the fresh air. 
[…] not rush to stuff them & get them ready to use again. It’s also nice to have extras as designated night time diapers (if you choose), a spare or two to keep in the car, and enough to have “changing […]
I like to use a workhorse fitted at night for my 2 year old with a wool cover over. When I first started using cloth I probably used disposable at night for 3 months before I invested in some wool. Best investment ever!!
This is something I want to try – nighttime diapers. I cloth diapered my first one from about 4 months or so on… although I fell off the bandwagon in spurts. We always did a disposable at night though because the couple times I tried cloth at night he woke up with his whole bed soaked. He’s out of diapers now, but I’ve been much better about my second one – I’ve even started taking him out of the house with cloth diapers on! A couple scary messy experiences with my first had my putting him in disposables when we went out of the house. Next step – nighttime diapers? We’ll see. Thanks for the post. =)
Feel free to email me or poke around the site if you need help! I spent a lot of time & money trying to keep my super soakers dry at night. 🙂
Generally we use sbish snapless multi but swapped the inserts for 2 Geffen absorbers or Thirsties doublers, with a bummis cover. Sometimes change it up with pocket triple stuffed. My toddlers is such a heavy wetter we have leaks by morning no matter what he wears so I’ve stopped trying so hard and grab different options each night.