BumGenius 4.0

I am now going to write about diapers, so feel free to skip the text and instead just rest your eyes on this gratuitous picture of one small but feisty exotic shorthair, Miss Posy Fern.

There.  I will keep this short, but I feel the need to write a brief BumGenius 4.0 recommendation, since while deciding what kind of cloth diaper, if any, to use for Owen, I was overwhelmed by the amount of choices out there and greatly helped by a few blog entries from various people saying what they used and what worked for them.

So.  The first two months Sean and I basically just used pampers on Owen.  We were new to diapering, and aghast at how frequently diapers needed to be changed in the beginning, and it was just easier to throw them away without having to bring laundry and basement stairs and this and that into the mix.  When Owen was two months old, however, we started using BumGenius 4.0 diapers on him in the day, and then pampers at night. 

(We still do this, and I’m not quite sure why we didn’t switch to using BumGenius in the night as well.  At first it was because when it was the middle of the night and we weren’t at our best, it would be easier to just use what we knew well – i.e. pampers.  But then it became a habit.  We now put a pamper on Owen at 7:30 pm and it pretty much lasts through the night until 6-ish, with the occasional bit of leg leaking.)

The BumGenius have been great though—easy to use, easy to launder, and they have fit Owen well as he has grown.  We started with them snapped into a medium-size diaper and now he wears them on their largest setting (although I’m told that as he gets more mobile, his shape will change, so he won’t grow out of the diaper). 

They are pretty!  Here they are looking like Jordan almonds on the drying rack:

We have 28 of them and basically end up doing two loads of diaper laundry per week.  When Owen was just drinking breastmilk, we could throw the diapers into the laundry without having to do any pre-cleaning of them first.  Once he started eating other foods, we added a Bumkins flushable diaper liner to each diaper, and then dump that in the trash upon taking the diaper off Owen.  We tried hooking up a sprayer to our toilet first and cleaning the diapers that way.  But the sprayer had way too much force, and once I discovered the liners, it was so much easier to use them and not have to do any pre-washing or spraying, not to mention carrying the diaper from Owen’s room to the bathroom while also carrying Owen.  The Bumkins liners are inexpensive too, and a soft cotton (they are flushable, but with our rather old plumbing, it seemed best not to attempt to do so).

Perhaps because of the liners, the BumGenius diapers really still look like new.  The insert is a little flatter then it once was, but I don’t really notice that the absorbency has changed at all, and the diaper insides are still clean and white.  I can definitely see how one could re-use the diapers for multiple kids (although of course we will not be doing so!)

The only downside is that they definitely are bulkier than a pamper, so they tended at first to push Owen’s clothing up a size.  And he often looked like a teletubby in a onesie.

I know some people used different cloth diaper brands and structures for different occasions, but I’m pleased with my decision to get one kind only and then not think about it again.  It worked for us, and I definitely recommend BumGenius for anyone looking to use an easy and effective cloth diaper.