Cloth diapering, the beginning. Why should you cloth diaper?

Okay, so usually I blog about things that make parenting an autistic child easier, but here is one that can make everyone's lives easier: cloth diapering.
"EASIER?" you ask? Cloth diapering conjures scary images of rags and safety pins, mountains of laundry, festering odors, wet laps, and lots and lots of work. That was your grandma's cloth diapering, and believe me when I say that today's cloth diapering doesn't have to be anything like your grandma's cloth diapering.
There are so many great reasons to cloth diaper. I'll just list some of the biggies:
1. Saving money- You can literally save THOUSANDS of dollars each child just by cloth diapering. IF you buy off brand at Costco and IF you are potty trained by 30 months you can expect to pay around $2000 for disposable diapers per child. You are literally throwing that money away. Imagine paying a quarter each and every time that you used your bathroom. With cloth diapering you can cut that to as little as $100, or do it with all the bells and whistles for $500. Since these are not thrown away they can be reused for multiple children, making for even more savings. For those of us with autistic children the number may be considerably higher, as many of our kids do not potty train at 2. My son wasn't fully potty trained until 5.
2. Saving resources- Not only does a diaper take (we think) 500 years to decompose, which is clogging our quickly overfilled landfills, but they take precious resources to make. Leave the planet one that your children will want. The amount of water to launder cloth diapers is much less than the amount of water used to make disposables also.
3. Know what is on your child's skin- Here is an interesting one. The gel that is inside disposable diapers, polyacrylate gel, is still sort of an unknown. We know that it dries out your child's skin, and we know that inhalation causes respiratory distress and potentially asthma. There have also been scientific reports that it gets quite hot when mixed with urine and may account for some sterility in boys due to raising the temperature of the testicles repeatedly day in and day out for 2 years. For my babies rashes only occur when teething, sick, or in disposables. Something in them causes red welts for both of mine.
4. Your baby gets wet- Okay, so this one seems like a strange one. Why would you want your baby to feel wet? There are a couple of reasons. First off, wet babies learn that they have gone potty. They then potty train MUCH easier than babies who have never linked the feeling of peeing with consequences of peeing. Also, and this one gets me every time, people usually point to the fact that you change less diapers in disposables as a bonus of disposables. Your baby still pees just as many times, you would just be leaving your baby in a half soaked disposable diaper sitting in urine. She may not feel wet, but her skin is still covered in urine. With cloth you and your baby both know when the diaper is wet and you change it. Your baby is rarely left sitting in urine, and that urine isn't mixed with chemicals. Now days there are even cloth stay dry liners that you can use to keep baby feeling dry if you don't want the baby to feel wet or are going to be unable to change for a bit, which I on occasion use when going for a longer drive.
5. They can be super cute- Today you have so many choices in cloth diapering! Don't underestimate how much more fun it is to change a diaper from one cute print to another. I really don't care for the cartoon characters on disposables and wanted a more sophisticated option. My husband prefers solids. With cloth you can find just about any kind of pattern or print, and you can even have them custom made for a few extra dollars per diaper. These guys are cute enough that you like leaving your little one running around in nothing but a t-shirt and diaper all summer, and pictures of babies in cloth diapers are so darned adorable!
6. Comfort- Do you enjoy wearing maxi pads? Remember those giant ones you had to wear postpartum? Would you choose to wear them every day for 2 years? I'm thinking that you would not. I know that I would not. Paper underwear does not sound like an enjoyable experience. Also, your baby is going to be trying out a lot of movements which can cause chaffing in disposables, and will have bumps and falls on a daily basis when learning crawling or walking. Those bumps are nicely padded with a cloth bum, which makes them less jarring on the spine as well.

Your starting point needs to be figuring out which of the many reasons for cloth diapering are MOST important to you. Come up with your top three and their order. This will drastically change what route you choose to go with cloth diapering. If your main goal is to save money you'll save a lot more with prefolds at less than $2 each (for the good ones) than you will with Goodmama fitted diapers for $30. Your second thought needs to be the other people in your home (and out) who will be sharing the cloth diapering responsibilities with you. My autistic son wont touch disposable diapers which feel and smell funny, but he is happy to help (so long as it is not a poopy one) with cloth. It isn't realistic to expect him to do a 2 or 3 step system, but if I keep pockets pre stuffed or another 1 step system around my work load in diaper changing goes down. My husband is happy to use cloth diapers so long as I do all of the laundry and they are easy to figure out. Happiness is all in the expectations: know where your family stands.
There are many types of diapers and literally hundreds of different brands to choose from. In an effort to make your life as simple as possible I've tried and reviewed, well, a lot of them! I get a diaper, then usually get a used one to see how they hold up. If I still like it then I get enough for a full day and put them into heavy rotation. A few weeks into making everyone use them the real test happens: they go into their respective baskets and I see which ones are being used when everyone has free choice. I then come back and report this all to you!
Make no mistake, my husband loves that he never has to buy diapers at 3 am or leave Costco with a handcart. He is also the child of two hippies, so he is glad that we aren't putting 8-12 poop or pee bombs into landfills each day that last 500 years. Neither of these are his reasons for cloth diapering. He does it because he loves me, and because I make it easy for him. If either of these changed he would not continue to cloth diaper. When I refer to "Dad friendliness" this is the sort of dad that I am talking about. :)
My reason? Well, aside from intelligence and beauty, my children also inherited my highly reactive red-head skin. When my son was born his Grandma Liz suggested that I try cloth diapering to help with skin irritation. I used prefolds and a Dappi cover system for the first year, and it completely eliminated skin issues! Back then there weren't nearly as many choices, and it was hard to get anyone else on board with cloth diapering, but in that year I fell in love with cloth diapering.
In the next blog I'll detail out some of the different types of systems that you can choose for your diapering needs, how to care for your diapers, and which systems are good for which applications.