“I don’t think you’d last a day”, said the elderly woman.

We had just been talking about cloth diapers. This conversation was months before Caleb and I started dating, therefore a little over a year before we got married, and years before we had our first baby.

I was working in senior living communities as an Activities/Life Enrichment Director and had become passionate about the zero waste and minimalist movements in college. I don’t remember how we actually got on the topic, but I had mentioned that I liked the idea of cloth diapers. Most of these women I was talking with were part of the generations previous who had cloth diapers as the ONLY option. They reminisced amongst themselves about the folding and hours spent laundering the dirty diapers, and how much easier diapers are now that parents can just throw all of it away in a fell swoop.

As I looked back down at my bamboo cutlery for my lunch from home, I’ve got to admit I was a little intimidated by the reality they shared and wondered how parents did it now.

Jump ahead 4 years, our family uses cloth diapers 100% of the time! We’ve even gotten comments while we’re out running errands or at church about how impressed people are to see us using cloth instead of disposable. I actually had another mom come up to me and my son while I was changing him at Half Price Books asking what I thought of cloth diapers and if it was realistic. I told her “YES, but…”.

I would NOT recommend cloth diapers to everyone, namely if you live in an apartment or share laundry machines with others. God blessed us in time for the arrival of our first son to move out of our apartment and into our own home (with our OWN washer/dryer). You definitely need machines that you can depend on using at any time. Besides that I think these diapers are great! Yes, there’s a higher cost up front (ours were about $30 for 6 to a pack), especially when you consider how much an average pack of disposal diapers costs (about $3.40/diaper). However, I think the last time we bought either cloth or disposable diapers (simply because we decided to go 100% cloth) was when our son was about 5 months old, and now he’s almost 16 months!

We’ve gotten other things like freezer-safe baby food jars, a bread box, and reusable applesauce pouches, and have saved so much money on groceries because of it. Now, cost of time over convenience IS the trade-off, but it also just takes some trial and error in working into your schedule. I remember one of the first loafs of bread I made took 2x as long as I thought it would in just glancing through the recipe, and then we found out that fruit flies had started reaching for our bread because the container didn’t have an airtight seal (we got a new bread box). Since then, we’ve made adjustments and found better rhythms for our family. Rather than spending countless hours in the kitchen each DAY, I’ve settled on when to run a load of laundry while I’m working in the kitchen, and when to bake vs. use the blender each week.

Caleb and I’ve also had many conversations about how to get chores done more efficiently especially because I tend to have 2 gears, either going about things in a relaxed manner or flying about all over the place like the world is about to end! With our second baby coming at the beginning of next year, I’m trying a few different things to see how housekeeping can still get done without my children only seeing their mom doing chores rather than spending time with them.

I’m so grateful that I CAN have so much time at home with our son and make this house a home, and I couldn’t do that without Caleb’s work in providing for us and constantly working together to be good stewards of what God has given us.