Bum Genius (guest post)
As Chief Dealer with the Diapers, Amber’s letting me do a guest post on my area of Lex care.
When Lex came home, we had already contacted The Stork, a cloth diaper service located over in Charlottesville. They had a Richmond route and provided a compelling alternative to disposable diapers (both economically and environmentally). The Stork rents you seven wraps and some huge quantity of cloth tri-fold diapers as liners. You hold onto (and wash) the wraps, and toss the soiled liners in a hamper for weekly collection.
Initially, we signed on for seventy diapers a week, and after Lex started daycare, we dropped to forty. In the six months he’s been in cloth diapers, he’s graduated through three sizes of wraps and diapers, but The Stork doesn’t provide the next size up. We’re told that most parents buy the next batch of wraps and only maintain the diaper service. We opted for a different approach: we’d buy our own cloth diapers.
We looked into a few options, but right away what grabbed our attention was bumGenius. Integrated organic cotton liners in resizable nylon wraps in fun, non-boring colors.
In the cloth diaper community, the only real point of contention we came across is dealing with diapers in high-efficiency washers, which tend not to use as much water or detergent. bumGenius has advice on keeping them clean with HE washers, though, and the diapers haven’t proved to be hard to clean yet, with urine or poop.
Lex still wears disposables to daycare. Licensure apparently precludes dealing with cloth diapers. But for evenings and weekends, these diapers are awesome: trim, stylish, absorbent, and soft on his little bum. And they should last him until he’s pottie-trained. Anecdotally, kids who wear cloth diapers graduate from them a year earlier than kids in disposables. The feedback gives them that little advantage.
