I bleed for you

Nov 18,2009 / By Maria / No Comment

>I think I mentioned before that we planned to use hubby’s plasma donation $ to build up a cloth stash. He was showing me his latest boo-boo from said donation and told our son that he is bleeding for his red little hiney!

I found a site that had great prices and sold most of the brands I was looking for. Dipes are expensive to begin with, but their cost can easily increase by 50% or more if you have to pay shipping on each item.

I chose 4 brands/styles I wanted to try based on reviews online & from other mamas in the CD groups. Happy Heiny’s one size pocket diapers with aplix, Blueberry Minky one size diaper, Fuzzibunz one size diaper with hip snap and a clearance diaper, Haute one-size traditional pocket diaper. Between the blood $ and a check I had from selling Mary Kay, I had about $100 to spend. There was a $5/$50 coupon as well as free shipping with a $99 purchase.

I threw in some Grandma El’s Diaper Rash Cream (post on diaper rash and CD safe creams to come!) and a planet wise small wet bag. I had been using gallon size ziplocs for clean/dirties when we went out up to this point.

A mom in the CD group on cafemom makes cooshie tooshies diapers. I was able to get a screaming deal on a pocket diaper and an AIO. They are mediums, whereas all the other diapers I have purchased were one size. However, the price was great and definitely worth it.

Now the worst part, waiting for the packages to arrive!

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Cloth Wipes

Nov 18,2009 / By Maria / No Comment

>So, I keep catching myself wrapping the diapers around the disosable wipe, and it’s only a matter of time before I wash one & have a big mess on my hand. I also learned that the “sensitive, alcohol free” wipes I was using weren’t so much.

I’d read about homemade disposable wipes on frugal living blogs. I didn’t want disposable and I was concerned about all the ingredients in the “recipes” because of cloth diaper safety, bum sensitivity and so forth.

I researched and found that the stars and cubes of wipe solution concentrate that WAHMs make would work best for me.

I had trouble finding affordable spray bottles, but my hubby ended up finding some for .97 at my most favoritest place ever (not), Wal-Mart. I picked up some distilled water, and ordered a sample pack of cubes.

I researched cloth wipes and even though I’d only have to use each wipe maybe 40 times for it to pay for itself, I again couldn’t bring myself to spend the money.

Instead, I grabbed some soft burp cloths that were a little too thin for my heavy spitter. I cut them in half, folded them in half, then zigzagged the edges to form two fray-free, double thickness cloths, each 1/4 the size of the original cloth. They fit perfectly in a wipes container, but I did choose to use a squirt bottle instead of pre-moistening them.

The solution smelled great, was easy to mix up and cleaned my baby’s bottom without irritating it. 1 cube made 8 oz of solution, and I am sure you could stretch it much further. 8 oz lasted about a week, putting the price per hiney wipe at rock bottom (pun intended).

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Cloth Diapers Diaper Rash

Chugging along

Nov 18,2009 / By Maria / No Comment

>We’ve been using 6 bumgenius per day, which means we have to use 2-4 disposables per day. Sometimes more.

I’ve got a good system & washing routine down and I’m loving them. I do wish I had enough for at least a day and a half though. I end up having to stay up late waiting for the washing machine so i can hang them to dry in order to be able to use them in the morning.

It’s very apparent that the cloth is helping his rash, though he is always red after a night in sposies, even when slathered with diaper cream.

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Cloth Diapers

OMG how are we going to pay for a wedding!

Nov 16,2009 / By Maria / 2 Comments

>I, the overplanner that I am, have a hard time living in the moment, and tend to freak myself out over stuff that may or may not happen in the very, very distant future. e.g. Going from worrying about pregnancy and childbirth (while pregnant with my first child) to hyperventilating over potty training techniques, school choice, dating, drugs and *thud*.

So, after I made an amazon wishlist of the different diapers I’d like to try, I started obsessing over diaper pails, liners, wet bags, diaper liners and OMG-I’m going to have to clean solid foods poop off of these things-hysteria. This would be followed shortly thereafter with an obsession over cloth wipes and then diaper sprayers, stay tuned.

Now, I needed to figure out how to get said diapers. I sure as heck didn’t want to pay for any more disposables, and even though 1 cloth diaper cost the same as two packs of sposies at a good price or 2.567 packs at a really good price, the cost was hard to swallow.

Due to some new and unexciting financial woes, we really didn’t have the funds to pay for necessities, not even disposable diapers.

My hubby decided that since he had time between work & class (for his Master’s Degree, yes I’m proud of him), he’d donate plasma. The first week, he made $60. $25 for each donation, and $10 for doing it twice the first week. He gave it to me and told me to order three more BG 3.0s! Yay!!

He chose clementine, ribbit and moonlight (I think, I get the two blue colors confused).

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Cloth Diapers

The verdict

Nov 16,2009 / By Maria / No Comment

>I was so psyched to try the diapers, they arrived so fast and were adorable. I chose the grasshopper, butternut and twilight colors. They are soft green, yellow & blue, though a little brighter than they had looked on my computer screen.

The instructions said I only had to wash them once, though some other materials become more absorbent with each wash.

I dried the inserts in the dryer, laid the diapers flat to dry and waited impatiently.

While I was waiting for them, I had figured out how long it would take for one diaper to pay for itself with full time use, for those 3 to pay for themselves with once daily use, and how long it would take to recoup the cost of a full stash with full time use.

Finally, they were dry, and within the first diaper change, I was hooked. They were a cinch to put on and were adorable to boot. Hubby called him a bubble butt but I thought the fluffy but was too stinkin’ cute (get it? stinking? ’cause it’s a diap…oh never mind).

It didn’t take long to see how much less irritated his bottom was during the hours he was wearing cloth. But, since we only had 3, we had to put him in disposables the rest of the day, and slather him with diaper cream.

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I bleed for you

Cloth Wipes

Chugging along

OMG how are we going to pay for a wedding!

The verdict

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