Cloth Diaper Love - Part 5 { Cloth Wipe Love }

So, yeah, still haven't finished all the cloth diaper posts!  These suckers take forever for me to write!  I'd been working on the first few for a while, and had 3 done before I posted the first one, so I really thought I'd be able to crank the others out pretty quickly.  Apparently not!  After this one I still want to do a post about troubleshooting, one about traveling, and a Q&A but I might end up doing the Q&A next and eventually get around to the other two.

So, cloth wipes...



Before Henry was born I made a big stack of cloth wipes with cute monkey print flannel:

you can see the tutorial here.  We actually used the cloth wipes before we used cloth diapers!  The hospital where I had Henry was very big on not using disposable wipes on newborns because of all the chemicals in them.  I assumed every hospital was the same way, but I'm learning that's not true!

Anyway, we used the cloth wipes on Henry's tiny newborn tush and pretty much ruined them.  Henry had horrible rash the first couple months of his life, and the only thing that would help it while he was in disposables was A&D, (after a few months we realized it was a yeast rash, and once we cleared it up we've never had rash problems again).  I knew enough to not use A&D with my cloth diapers, but it never occured to me that they would ruin our cloth wipes as well.

Well, they did.

By the time we were cloth diapering full time, we'd tossed the cloth wipes and switched to disposable wipes.  I eventually bought some more cloth wipes, (I would have made more, but hello, I had a newborn, and let's face it that was not going to happen! ha!), from my fav DFW cloth diaper shop, The Nappy Shoppe, but for several months we went back and forth between using the cloth wipes and using disposables. We just couldn't seem to settle in to a routine or system that worked well enough for us, and it always seemed to be easier to use the disposable wipes.

A couple of months ago, we finally set up a system that we're happy with, and haven't looked back!  I read a whole bunch of cloth wipes blog posts and just combined some of my favorites.  TBoff&Willis did a great post on cloth wipes that I remembered after I wrote all this, and I went to check it out, and it's really similar to this post, I should have looked it up earlier and just linked to it and saved myself an hour or two! ha!

We have not bought disposable wipes in probably 3 months, and we honestly don't miss them at all.  Truth be told, cloth wipes work so much better than disposable wipes!  You know those really dirty diapers where you sometimes have to use 4-5 disposable wipes to clean up?  I've never used more than 2 cloth wipes to clean up a diaper mess!  They work so well and they don't dry out baby hiney like disposable wipes.  Not to mention, you're not buying disposable wipes all the time, so more $$$ saving!

Here's our routine for cloth wipes, we have to do this every 3 days probably.  It seems like every other time we do diaper laundry, we have to refill the cloth wipes solution.  We usually do them when Henry's napping or asleep at night, so they'll be nice and cool when he wakes up, (you'll see why in a minute).

First we assemble all our supplies:

A stack of wipes, (probably 15-20 or so), some pharmaceutical grade tea tree oil, (I ordered ours' from Amazon here), organic coconut oil, (the same thing we use for diaper rash cream, I'm telling you-this stuff is magic!), an empty disposable wipes container all nice and clean, and 1.5 cups of boiling water.  I boil the water first just so it can stand being out a few days and not get funky.

Then I take my stack of wipes and fold them so that they'll easily come out of the top dispenser of the wipes box.  Like so:

Once I've got all my wipes folded and stacked all nice and neat:

I just drop them in the empty disposable wipes box:

I measure out 1 1/2 cups of boiled water into a glass measuring cup and add a heaping scoop of coconut oil, (probably 1 - 1 1/2 Tbps), and a few drops of tea tree oil, (about 1/4 tsp), and stir it all together.  The coconut oil will melt in the hot water.

Because we added two kinds of oil, the mixture will definitely look oily.  Also, tea tree oil is some strong smelling stuff!  You've been warned!

After everything is mixed all together I let it cool for a little while, and then just pour the water/coconut oil/tea tree oil solution over the wipes in the box.

Ta-daa! Cloth wipes!

It should go without saying, but I let the wipes cool to room temperature before I use them on a precious baby hiney.  We don't want a scalded tush in this house!

Those of you who cloth diaper, do you use cloth wipes too?   What's your cloth wipe routine?  Any more cloth diaper questions from anyone?  I'm going to try and do a cloth diaper Q&A post tomorrow.  

Jennifer

P.S.  If anyone is interested in gDiapers, they're featured on Zulily today!  We've never tried them, but I have a few friends who use them and love them!  Go here to join zulily and check them out!