There are a lot of benefits of cloth diapering– economical, environmental, and reports of earlier potty training or less diaper rash.

What initially drew my family to cloth diapering was cost. My husband and I had been married a little less than two years, we were young, we didn’t have a ton of money, but we knew that I wanted to stay home with our baby if we could make it work. So when I was pregnant (as soon as I stopped puking eight times a day) I started researching ways to save money. Cloth diapers immediately came up.

I researched more, saw that there were ways to cloth diaper cheaply, and decided to go for it. My parents bought us a portable washing machine so that I could do laundry in our place, because we lived in an apartment building with community laundry machines. You can cloth diaper with community laundry, but my parents were generously trying to save me the extra effort. We got ourselves two dozen Chinese prefolds, a bunch of pins, and a few covers. Friends gifted us some pocket diapers from our registry. We were off!

And that was our entire stash for awhile. Which works! You can do cloth diapers for such a small investment. Prefolds and covers work well, wash easily, and cost next-to-nothing (I think we invested the equivalent of 4-5 packages of disposable diapers for more than a year’s worth of diapering supplies).

As my husband got promoted, we had more money to spend and cost was no longer necessarily a factor in cloth diapering. But we stayed with it for all four of our kids. Why? Well, for one thing, we already had invested. We had diapers that were worn by all four kids. Talk about bang-for-your-buck. It’s not the only reason I kept using cloth though.

Have you seen cloth diapers? They are adorable. Seriously, so cute. Most of my favorite pictures of my boys are of them as babies crawling or toddling around in nothing but a cloth diaper. I’m only slightly embarrassed to admit that I regularly matched diapers to outfits. And I have 100% bought diapers because I thought they were cute, not because I really needed to add more. Plus we’ve branched out to different types of diapers- all-in-ones, more pockets, fitted diapers, new brands of covers.

I could go on and on about how cloth seems more comfortable for babies, the environmental benefits, and other ways cloth rocks. But I’ll spare you the novel. Ask any of my friends though, and they’ll tell you that I’m kind of a cloth diaper evangelist. I have lent all of my close friends newborn cloth diapers to try out when they had babies. I try to get everyone on board.

Do you also go around telling everyone about why you love cloth? What’s the biggest benefit for YOUR family?