Tips and Tricks to cloth diapering a 6-12 month old

From my previous post I promised I would give an update once our baby turned 6 months- so here it is: 

 

1.But what about the poop????

So the biggest change for us once we hit the 6 month mark was we started introducing solids. Once you introduce solids you can no longer just throw poopy diapers into the washer without rinsing them. 

Some things that we have found that help us deal with the poop situation include: 

Bamboo Liners 

These things have really saved us and have majorly helped us continue to cloth diaper past 6 months. While they are technically an extra expense I believe they are 100% worth it for us. Basically they are a thin sheet of bamboo that you lay in between the cloth insert and your child. Urine will just go right through it but it will catch the poop (as long as it's not liquid) and make it so you can just "plop" the poop into the toilet or into the trash can. 

Amazon sells a 400 pack. This lasts us about 4 months. It's crazy to think about it when you think about how many diapers we've gone through in that amount of time. 

When you have a major blow out or super runny poop that doesn't stay on the bamboo liner then you have to proceed to spraying the poop off with a sprayer. We noticed that by using the bamboo liners that we went from using the sprayer everyday to only a few times a week if that. Sometimes we have a good week and don't use it at all! 

Installing a bidet and spray pail 

We decided that the best way to spray diapers was to purchase a bidet sprayer that hooks up to our bathroom toilet. We found this rather inexpensively on Amazon but I also know you can find them at hardware stores as well. I've heard of people washing them out in a bathtub with a bucket but hauling a bucket or poopy water downstairs and outside didn't seem that appealing to me. 

In addition to the sprayer we purchased a "spray pail" on amazon. This is essentially a plastic triangle with a clip inside. You clip the dirty diaper to the pail and use the bidet to spray the poop off and into the toilet. Because the pail is triangle shaped it protects you and your bathroom from having poopy water sprayed everywhere (although this is still possible if you try hard enough). 

We find this to be fairly effective for us- yes it is slightly cumbersome but it's only an extra few minutes of work. We also keep a small wet bag in our main bathroom with the sprayer so that we aren't transporting wet poopy diapers across the hall. 

Being mindful of what we are feeding our baby 

We pay attention to what foods give him more runny poops and try to stagger those types of foods with more "bulk forming" foods. This gives us the best shot at having the bamboo liners be successful. 

2. Increasing the Absorption 

As we rounded into 6 months we noticed that our single liners were starting to no longer be enough and that we were often leaking or soaking through. 

We started using "doublers"- basically a pad that stacks on top of another pad. So far this has worked for us. We started doing doublers for just naps and then increased it to during awake time as well as he became awake for longer periods of time. Often during naps we will do a microfiber pad on top because these are good at wicking away moisture and a bamboo/hemp insert on the bottom to hold in all the liquid and get us through naps. 

The doublers are still working for us, although we have to be pretty good about changing them around the 2.5 hour mark or you will start to have leaks. He is still taking 2 naps a day at this point and is at about 2.5 to 3 hour wake windows. As this changes I anticipate that we will have to change diapers more frequently while he is awake but we will cross that bridge when we get there. 

The only major con to using doublers is that they give him a very "fluffy" butt that can be hard to snap the onsies around.

3. Prep the diapers ahead of time

As our baby becomes more mobile changing diapers has become akin to wrestling an alligator. It also doesn't help that cloth diapers take a little longer to get on than disposables. We have learned to prep the diapers with the inserts before attempting to change your child. If you think they are going to just lay there like they used to when they were 3 months old while you snap the insert into place you've got a whole thing coming to you. I found that after I change his diaper I set my baby down on the ground to play and then I prep a new diaper so that it's ready to go for his next diaper change. This seems to be very effective for us. 

4.What about the wash routine??

My wash routine stays the same- as long as the poopy diapers are rinsed they go in with the other diapers. Because of our hard water situation I still continue to strip my diapers about every 2 months or so to keep the bad smells at bay. 

Overall 

Overall we are finding that we are pretty successful at cloth diapering during the day. We do recognize that there would be no way we could do this at night. For nighttime I've really only seen others have success with wool. We also don't take cloth diapers when we go out because it's just too cumbersome. Still I believe we saved hundreds to hopefully thousands of dollars as our baby gets older. We also plan on using these diapers again if we have a second child.