So...
...we made a switch.
While I still enjoy my beloved prefolds and wool covers, they were impractical for us anytime we left the house. Wool isn't exactly water-repellent, so while the covers hold up pretty well all it takes is a couple good soakings for it to leak through and dampen their clothes. Which never really happened while at home (they get changed often enough), but I can't always guarantee the frequency of changes when we're out of the house. Also it's a lot to schlep around in a diaper bag: prefolds, doublers, and extra covers (always times two!) take up precious real estate that I don't have.
Okay, no big deal, just slap a disposable diaper on there and away we go.
And that's what we did for awhile. We weren't going through that many disposables, and were still able to wear cloth while at home. Except. Then we started leaving the house more and more, especially as the weather got nicer. Caden and Brooklyn love to go "bye bye", so when we're gone twice a day, often for a good chunk of the morning and the afternoon, plus their disposables hold so much wetness and keep them feeling dry, they don't really need to be changed all that often. So more often than not, we went entire days in disposables, which made our cloth diapering stash seem unnecessary.
Add in the fact that they were starting to grow out of the medium-sized prefolds (which have lasted us since last August) (!!!!!) and it seemed time to start shopping around. A few people I know use Best Bottoms, so that's what I went with.
Two weeks in: so far, so good. We do like them. The ease of snapping an insert in is great. The covers are actually trimmer than our prefold/wool combo, so they fit under their clothes a lot nicer (though still bulkier than a disposable). We can even (get this!) wear them ALL NIGHT, something we abandoned with our prefolds long ago because of the aforementioned soaking-their-clothes-through-the-wool-cover problem. (As well as the fact that there didn't seem to be enough doublers/inserts in the world to keep Caden dry at night.)
So, not only are we still cloth diapering, we're actually cloth diapering more than we used to.
The downsides: poop. With the prefolds, everything stayed contained on the prefold and even in our flushable liners. The wool covers rarely got dirty anymore. The Best Bottoms tend to cause some spillage off the snap-in insert and onto the inside of the cover, which is easy to clean/wipe down, but, y'know, the whole Ick Factor. It also takes longer to change than a prefold, unless you have a new cover ready to go with an insert all snapped in, which I'm not accustomed to doing yet. Tyson and I were pros at quick prefold changes, but we're not quite there yet with all the unsnapping, resnapping, etc. We'll get there. We also could use more covers (we have two for him and two for her right now, one each of snap and Velcro since I prefer snaps and Tyson prefers Velcro) (I KNOW I'm a snap convert! However I think it's easier now to fit their (still scrawny) thighs in snap covers snugly, without the newborn chicken legs that always left a gap.) but I'm hoping to find some at a discount instead of buying more full price. However we wash fairly often, (mostly because we could ALSO use more inserts. See: I'm cheap, would like at a discount, etc.), so it's not so terrible. It's also probably slightly more expensive than our old system, though not by much since I favored wool covers at forty bucks a pop.
The covers are also pretty versatile. You don't have to use a snap insert with them. I've thrown in a prefold (folded in thirds) when I've run out of the snap-in inserts, and used a regular cotton insert on top of a snap-in for extra coverage. I feel like a cloth diaper ninja now, you know the ones. The ones who blog about how they purchased cloth diapering system X, but use the inserts and fitteds from system Y, and combine it all with some bamboo-hemp-chamomile-save-the-trees liners that they grew in their backyard and sewed together themselves. Okay, I'm not quite there yet, but I'm glad we have both options to work with.
{This cloth diapering message brought to you by Caden and the letter C, for this is oh so Comfortable.}
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