Diapers

I'll preface all this by saying, BASED ON WHAT WE KNOW NOW....we plan to try and cloth diaper our baby for hopefully a majority of the time.  I definitely realize there are times and situations where using disposables will just be easiest (e.g. the first few weeks at home, overnight, going to a baby-sitter, etc).  If you are like me and aren't up on the baby scene in the new millenium you are probably thinking I'm crazy and picturing us cloth diapering using something like this:

This is what I pictured and thought only like hippies or people really into saving the environment did this....then I got halfway educated and have changed my mind!  There are TONS of options out there and from what I've read it really just depends on the kid which brand works best and what the parents prefer.  I think we would go with All-In-Ones (AIOs) where all of the components of the diaper are one piece...as the name would lead you to believe!  I believe you can add extra liners in here for instance at night to help absorb more.  You can get snaps or velcro-- I've heard definitely go with the snaps cause over time the velcro will wear down.  So you can visualize what I'm talking about, here is an example:

Notice all the snaps- this is so you can adjust as your baby grows and get lots of use out of them!  And then when you have a 2nd kid, can reuse again and get your money's worth even more!  they say you will spend about $1500-2000 in disposable diapers for each kid...so let's just say that's about $3500 total if we have 2 kids.  Cloth diapers do require an upfront investment, but I estimate for about $300 you can get started.  It depends how many diapers you want to buy and which brands you choose- obviously the more diapers you have, then the less often you'll have to do laundry!

We will have to plan to do diaper laundry probably every 2-3 days, which could end up being more of a pain than I want to deal with, but am hoping it will just become second nature.  And there is of course an extra cost of doing all this laundry, but is MINIMAL compared to the expense of going through disposable diapers.
There is a great store in St. Louis called Cotton Babies.  You can link to the website by clicking here and it goes through a lot of Q&As.  They offer a class on all (or at least most) Saturdays that will go over cloth diapering basics and what you need to know.  I think in the next couple months we will go learn about it and check out the items in store and see what we think.  I feel like I really don't have anything to lose by attempting to do this....if it doesn't work out, then at least I'll know we tried and just wasn't for us.  Crossing my fingers that it will work out though!

Also, they make some super cute patterns- check out some of these!