My first attempt at flat diapers overnight

When I agreed to this challenge I somehow just conveniently forgot about the overnight part.  I mean the challenge rules clearly state that you can use your 'regular' diapers for overnight but that they recommend that you at least try with a flat.  Our regular overnight diapers are disposables, and I think that that sort of veers away from the whole idea of the challenge.  I mean, this is supposed to prove that a low-income family can diaper their baby for much less money by using cloth flats.  Economically-minded cloth diapering doesn't put the kibosh on disposables at night, but I feel as though if this were really the way you were diapering your child, then you wouldn't have the paper diaper to fall back on.  And so tonight, against my better judgement and with visions of a sopping child at dawn filling my head, I cloth diapered my son for bed.

Here's how I did it:

First I took a diaper cover - this one is by GroVia



I folded a flat diaper into half, and then half again, and laid it on the cover.

 

Then I laid a pre-fold diaper on top of the flat





I folded the pre-fold into thirds




Then I fold the flat diaper into thirds around the prefold




Finally I added an extra two layers with a doubler of especially soft cotton.




Here's a side view of how thick this diaper was.

 I don't know if this was over-kill yet because I've never sent a toddler to bed, a toddler who pees like crazy, in a cloth diaper.  We shall see.

And a note about washing.  I've decided to wash every day.  Looking at my diaper stash this probably isn't necessary, but I think it's a good idea for sanitary reasons, to minimize staining and also to keep the process as quick as possible with a minimal number of diapers to wash.  Since today started a little late, we only had a little under five hours of cloth diaper time before bed.  The wash tonight was three diapers, plus a diaper and cover that were waiting to be washed already.  Here's how I did it:

1) I rinsed the one soiled diaper out as soon as it happened.  The wet diapers I just left as they were until wash time.

2)  I ran a few inches of HOT water into the bathtub and used about a tablespoon of liquid laundry detergent.  The laundry went into the water and soaked for about 20 minutes.

3)  After the soaking I went in with my hands and agitated the diapers for about a minute.  What I mean by that is that I swished them around, squeezed them under water, unfolded them and squeezed in a different way, etc.  Mainly I was trying to push the detergent through the fabric because no solid waste was on the diapers.

4)  I drained the tub, wrung out each diaper firmly, ran the tub again and repeated the detergent amount.  This time I gave each diaper an individual look.  One of them had some staining which I focused on by rubbing some detergent directly onto the stain and scrubbing it.  I also gave some concentrated attention to the cover, especially around the leg holes.

5)  I drained the tub again, wrung out each diaper, and filled the tub with cold water and no detergent.  I rinsed the diapers thoroughly.  Then I drained the tub and rinsed it out.  I wrung out each diaper firmly.  Then I unfolded them, re-folded them, and wrung them out again to get as much water as possible from each diaper.

6)  I shook the diapers out and hung them on a clothesline on the back stairway of my apartment.  They aren't outside, but they are right next to the open stairway window and have lots of air circulation.

One thing I did was to time myself.  The soaking process was about 20 minutes but didn't require any effort on my part, so I'm not counting that.  The scrubbing, washing, rinsing, wringing and hanging took about 20 minutes on its own.  If I was using cloth diapers as a money-saving technique, this would make me probably re-think my decision.  Twenty minutes of kneeling beside the bathtub and scrubbing cloth is a lot.  Clearly I need to get that camp washer up and running soon and cut down the time it takes me to wash my diapers.  I haven't even counted the time it will take me to clean my bathtub now that it was filled with dirty diapers...

Pros:
 - The diapers have (so far) not leaked or malfunctioned in any *ahem* really bad way.  The one occasion that that could have seriously happened everything stayed where it ought.

-Also, the cleaning was easy - actually it was way easier to clean a flat diaper than it ever was to clean a pre-fold.

Cons:
 - If the length of time between diaper changes stays static, we're looking at up to twelve diapers every day, not including the doublers and prefolds for nap and bedtime.  That's a lot of diapers to wash every night by hand.

- The length of time it takes to wash everything could pose a problem, especially if you're doing this for financial reasons.  Do you want to spend 40 minutes or more a night washing laundry by hand?

- Also, clearly I need to wear gloves next time; my hands are all chapped from the detergent and the scrubbing.