Seven years of savings!

A significant happening took place in the Baker household last month…the youngest child stopped wearing diapers at night. This means that, after almost seven years of daily diaper handling, we can say goodbye to the diapers.

Before my first child was born, my husband and I had decided to use cloth diapers on our new baby. We spent less than $600 to stock up on 24 one-size cotton diapers, booster liners and covers, and a couple of diaper pails. We already had an efficient front-loading washing machine and a clothes line. We were set.

The first week of parenthood was a crazy time of adjusting, but we soon established our system for cloth diapering, and found it straightforward to use. We used those 24 diapers through until child #2 was born, when with two children in diapers at the same time, I added 6 more bamboo one-size diapers to the collection.

Most figures you can find to compare the costs of cloth and disposable diapers are based on just the first 2½ years of a child’s life. Many North American children are still in diapers beyond that age, as were ours. Our first saw the light on a Leap Day, aged 3 years and 2 months, when I took away his daytime diapers after getting fed up of trying to gently encourage him to use the potty he knew full well how to use. Two weeks later he was dry at night too. Child #2 was more interested in potty-training (maybe the attraction of toilet sword-fights with his brother helped) and he moved out of daytime diapers aged just over 2 years. He wasn’t physiologically ready to lose the nighttime diapers for another 2½ years. Here is how our costs compare to the standards:

The cost of one child (2.5 years)

CLOTH (including laundry) = $1,000 DISPOSABLE = $2,275

Our cost for two children (nearly 7 years)
CLOTH (including laundry) = $1,200 DISPOSABLE = $5,400

So, we just saved $4,200.

And kept over 15,000 disposable diapers out of the land-fill.

And never have to change another diaper ever again!

Emma has been Wildsight’s Administrative Director since 2004, and coordinated the Real Diaper Campaign…when her children were in diapers.