We've been cloth diapering since Dreamer's umbilical cord fell off, with just occasional disposable use. We've been doing
prefolds and covers. My parents generously bought us the prefolds and a few of these covers. This is a photo of my covers so far. This is "part one" because I am working on crochetng wool soakers which I'll be doing a post on later.
One of the goals of my stash is not just to diaper Dreamer but to diaper at least two babies, that is, I am keeping my stash even after she's potty trained so we can diaper the next one too! With that understanding we were deliberately gender neutral, even after we found out she was a girl.
The covers pictured above are, starting with the bumblebee patterned one and going clockwise: 2
Bumchums (one "busy bee", one "rain drops"),
2 Bummis Superbrites (one pictured here, I have two of the same pattern/color), 2 small
Carter's diaper pants (the duckies), 1
Thirsties Duo (light green), 1
Ollingtons St (the red), and 2
Bumberry's (green and blue.)
She has already outgrown the two Carter's yellow duck ones, which were a gift from her great-aunt Betsy. The light green Thirsties Duo, is a size small which she is just about to outgrow. They're for until 18 pounds and at her six month appointment she was 16 pounds so she's probably got weeks at most left. My parents got it for me from America at the same time as the prefolds. It's a very good cover.
The red one is my least favorite cover. It's a Ollington St's, and it neither fits well nor do I like the fuzzy white stuff in it, as it gets dirty pretty much every time. I'll explain what I mean by that in a minute.
The Bummis Super Brites are size medium and she only started fitting it at about month four I think? Which was perfect because she basically outgrew the little Carter's ones at the same time. They're good covers and were also a gift from my parents.
I love the Bumchums and the Bumberry's. I bought both in India and they're both equally great, though I like the fun patterns of the Bumchums (to be fair, Bumberry also has patterns, but they charged more for them so I found it more economical to get solids.) These four were the ones purchased by Ryan and I. We bought one of each, as well as the St. Ollington's, before she was born/when she was a newborn. We quickly decided it wasn't worth investing in any more St. Ollington's, but when she hit 6 months we decided we needed more covers and decided to buy one more each of the others because they're such good covers.
We needed to get more covers then because one of the beautiful things of the prefold/cover system is that you can go through many prefolds with the same cover, normally. So when she was a newborn she'd have 22+ diaper changes a day (no exaggeration) but she sometimes could wear just one cover that whole time! Generally it was more 2 to 4, but our covers were sufficient. The Carter's were just one times, since they're not really waterproof the same way, but they were good backup for the days when I had covers on the line. The reason the Ollington St.'s aren't highly recommended by me is mainly that I only got one or two uses out of them too, as they were a magnet for something to leak through the prefold and get on the cover. The others though I could easily get through ten plus changes.
At around 3 to 5 months, I don't really remember when, she dropped down to about 6 changes a day, with only one of those being "solid waste" and generally only the solids would make us change a cover. However, at 6 months when she began solids she had more "solids" diapers than just wet ones again, and often her wet ones were so heavy that the covers weren't usable. And so really we were getting MAYBE two uses out of each cover so we had to invest in some more and that's when we bought the green Bumberry and the raindrops Bumchum. I also finally got to work on the wool soakers!
Which I will tell you more about in part two!
