Diapering: Gerber Diapers
Rate this post:Thanks to Marie for this Frugal Baby Tip!
I know you're going to hear a lot of people say that the Gerber birdseye (not DSQ) are garbage, but here's my 2 cents anyway. When my daughter was born, we were living in Italy and couldn't find any cloth diapers, much less have any idea where to find any. So my mom went out to look for some for me, and ended up buying the Gerber birdseye prefolds, the prefolds with an absorbent pad (which IS garbage), and the flat twills. She washed them all before mailing them to me.
She did comment that none of these diapers were like the ones she'd used on all of us, but since it was all she could find, that's what we went with. I have washed, and washed, and washed, and for the first six months, doing what Laura in the UK calls the boil wash on these diapers, and I'm still using them now, over a year later!
I started out folding them in half (since my daughter was so tiny) and pinning them with a newborn or small plastic pant over them. I know that these pants don't breathe, and a lot of people don't like them because of the vinyl, but again, that's all we could find or knew about. Because my daughter pooped everytime I fed her, I was changing her every 1-1/2 to 2 hours, and they worked just fine. I never had leaks, and if we had a poop blowout, it was contained in the plastic pants. BTW, when we did use disposables (for travelling), she ALWAYS blew out of them up the back anytime she pooped. So if you're breastfeeding, changing over to disposables will probably be worse.
As she's gotten older, I've had to double up the diapers, because they're not terribly absorbent, but even at 14 months, she can go 3-4 hours with one of these diapers with another folded in middle as a doubler. Maybe she's just not a heavy wetter!
Anyway, YMMV, but I wouldn't give up just yet. I would try to find better wraps or covers, consider pinning, and keep trying. Now that I know more about what's available, I would probably look into them if we ever have another, but for now, what I have still works, and it saved us a ton of money!
Category: Diapering
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